La teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia tra neo- e post-

Su alcune questioni terminologiche e (dunque) tassonomiche

Abstract

This paper offers a theoretical survey of the categories that structure literary modernity – modernity, modernism, the avant-gardes, the neo-avant-gardes, and postmodernity/postmodernism – with particular attention to the terminological, and therefore taxonomic, consequences of certain improper yet widely accepted equivalences. It starts from the premise that periodisation, although not the final goal of critical inquiry, remains unavoidable if distinct phenomena are to be made comparable. The article examines how historical generalisation produces symmetries and paradoxes that unsettle the assumptions underpinning national literary histories. It rereads “modernité” in the light of the material transformation of the art market and of the changing role of the artist between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within this framework, it defines the specificity of avant-garde art in relation to Modernism: not merely stylistic and formal experimentation, but an assault on the “institution of art”, on its forms of autonomy, and on its apparatuses—the market and the museum. Finally, the article clarifies the position of the neo-avant-gardes in the post-war period: movements that come “after” the historical rupture constituted by the Second World War and the third industrial revolution, yet cannot be reduced to Postmodernism.