The Bankruptcy of Left-Wing Kulturkritik

The words of the keynote speaker at the “After the Avant-Garde” Conference (University of Houston, March 6-9, 1985) were destined to fall on deaf ears. Here was the 55-year-old Hans Magnus Enzensberger—poet, essayist, editor of Kursbuch —who 15 years earlier had argued for a left-wing “takeover” of the media for revolutionary ends. Yet this night he had a more Socratic wisdom to convey: an innate distrust of the concept of the avant-garde, a notion that suggests the obligation of a self-styled political or artistic elite to become standard-bearers for the rest of humanity — presumably, the unenlightened “masses” — who will in due time follow suit. Enzensberger subjected the sheer presumption of this conception to unsparing critical scrutiny

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Aside · Avant garde · Distrust · Elite · Humanity · Literature · Political science · Politics · Presumption · Scrutiny · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy