Front cover image for Reluctant modernity : the institution of art and its historical forms

Reluctant modernity : the institution of art and its historical forms

In this book Aleš Debeljak offers a refreshing alternative to postmodernists such as Baudrillard who declare the death of art conceived as yet another source of rootless circulating fictions. Inspired by the melancholy critical theory of Adorno and Bejamin, Debeljak shows that with the dawning of modernity, art was made autonomous - art production was effectively emancipated from the exigencies of everyday life and its guiding ideal of purposive rationality. The deterioration of bourgeois liberal individualism into the narcissism of modern mass society accompanied the decomposition of art into simplified mass art and commercialized kitsch. Today, argues Debeljak, postmodern art is subjected to infinite reproducibility, total integration into mass society, and political resignation - it no longer represents an alternative reality. The postmodern institution of art thus cannot be simply cured of modern structures and assumptions, but is, instead, fated to a continuous and painful relationship with modernity. -- from back cover
Print Book, English, 1998
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, 1998
xxiv, 211 pages ; 24 cm
9780847685820, 9780847685837, 0847685829, 0847685837
37588430
Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Preface Chapter 3 Acknowledgements Chapter 4 Introduction Chapter 5 Framing the Logic of Modernity Chapter 6 The Bourgeois Public Sphere in Modernity Chapter 7 The Institution of Art in Modernity Chapter 8 The Dissolution of the Bourgeois Public Sphere Chapter 9 The Institution of Art in Postmodernity Chapter 10 References Chapter 11 Index