Harold Rosenberg
ART AND POLITICS
(FromtheNoteBook)
Avant-garde art, and avant-gardism in general, are at bottom comic.
Vanguard art made its first public appearance at the Salon des Inde–
pendents arranged under the mandate of Louis Bonaparte, Marx's
Clown Prince. The primal avant-garde masterpiece is Manet's "Le De–
jeuner sur L'Herbe," in which two types dressed in bohemian style
recline on the grass discussing art in the company of a fleshy nude.
Modern artists as gods on Mount Olympus. This is the life!
While Marx waited in the London Museum for history
to
complete a
noble pattern by means of "the revolution of the nineteenth century"
(the Proletarian Revolution), Louis B, Emperor of
La
Boheme, inau–
gurated the age of farce - an age dominated not by material condi–
tions but by the aesthetics of parody, based on the essentially monkey
nature of man.
A true German classicist, Marx was convinced that civilization would
somehow circle back to the Greeks, that is, to Greek 'literature: Sopho–
clean tragedy and Aristotelian philosophy. And this in spite of The
Masses, Bottom's jolly crew that mimics and caricatures everything.
While Marx's classical revolution was to be a repetition of the past on
the highest intellectual level, Louis' actual revolution was repetition
on the lowest level, that of nothing human is alien to me.
Along with the modern masses came the avant-garde, the self-ap–
pointed leaders inspired with the belief that they and their contempo–
raries could equal and surpass the greatest feats in history.
If
the best
could not be duplicated in detail, it could be matched in essence. Any
discrepancies would be taken light-heartedly. So Louis is not Napo–
leon the Great. Why should a naked girl on the grass, which delights
