What to Do with the Avant-Garde? Or: What Remains of the 19th Century in the Art of the 20th?

Abstract

This paper would like to argue that the two questions in its title are really one and the same and, moreover, that a certain way of answering them can help us understand the question: What happens when the avant-garde of yesterday becomes academic? Indeed, what remains of the 19th century in the art of the 20th is art in general, by which is meant a situation in which it has become technically possible and institutionally legitimate to make art using anything and everything. Often seen as a consequence of Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade, this situation is in fact its prerequisite. My paper offers a historical and theoretical interpretation of art in general, centred on the notion of convention and destined to displace other, ideological, definitions of the avant-garde.