Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde

Seminar summary

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde offers a new way of analysing and theorizing the question of the avant-garde today. It is customary within art history and cultural history to argue that the avant-garde disappeared as an (anti)artistic gesture during the 1960s. The dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972 is often presented as the endpoint in the history of the avant-garde. The implosion of the ’68 revolt – quickly in France, after a long process of revolt and counter-revolt in countries like Italy – effectively ended the attempt to use art as a vehicle for a transformation of capitalist society. This book contributes to the discussion of the avant-garde today by discussing whether it is still relevant for a contemporary anti-systemic critique and analysing different instances where the avant-garde has creeped into protests and social experiments outside art and art institutions.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar will take place online on Wednesday 4 December 2024 at 12pm.

It is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

Speaker bio

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is Professor in Political Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Playmates and Playboys at a Higher Level: J.V. Martin and the Situationist International (2014), Crisis to Insurrection (2015), After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties (2018), Trump’s Counter-Revolution (2018), Hegel after Occupy (2018) and Late Capitalist Fascism (2022).