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Review: Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007; xii + 435 pp.; US$45.00 hbk; ISBN 9780520252707

Review: Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in... 220 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 45 No 1 Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007; xii + 435 pp.; US$45.00 hbk; ISBN 9780520252707 Starting in the 1960s, but especially in the 1970s, critics in Europe and the United States began to attack modernism as a cultural project on the basis of what they perceived as its aloofness and political detachment. They decried it as a disengaged, élitist endeavor that stood in the way of more critical and democratic cultural practices and called for its transcendence. Walter Adamson’s new book Embattled Avant-Gardes is a thoroughgoing refuta- tion of this perspective and an impassioned defense of early twentieth-century modernism from its later ‘postmodernist’ detractors. Adamson argues that modernism was a fundamentally political project from the beginning, and that in its avant-garde variety, contrary to being élitist, it sought to advance the cause of cultural democracy, extending the reception and practice of art to ever greater numbers of people. If modernism was at its core political, what was the essence of its politics? Adamson’s answer is ‘resistance to commodification’. By this he means the struggle to preserve, in the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Contemporary History SAGE

Review: Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007; xii + 435 pp.; US$45.00 hbk; ISBN 9780520252707

Ort, Thomas
Journal of Contemporary History , Volume 45 (1): 2 – Jan 1, 2010
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Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
Copyright © by SAGE Publications
ISSN
0022-0094
eISSN
1461-7250
DOI
10.1177/00220094100450011106
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Abstract

220 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 45 No 1 Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007; xii + 435 pp.; US$45.00 hbk; ISBN 9780520252707 Starting in the 1960s, but especially in the 1970s, critics in Europe and the United States began to attack modernism as a cultural project on the basis of what they perceived as its aloofness and political detachment. They decried it as a disengaged, élitist endeavor that stood in the way of more critical and democratic cultural practices and called for its transcendence. Walter Adamson’s new book Embattled Avant-Gardes is a thoroughgoing refuta- tion of this perspective and an impassioned defense of early twentieth-century modernism from its later ‘postmodernist’ detractors. Adamson argues that modernism was a fundamentally political project from the beginning, and that in its avant-garde variety, contrary to being élitist, it sought to advance the cause of cultural democracy, extending the reception and practice of art to ever greater numbers of people. If modernism was at its core political, what was the essence of its politics? Adamson’s answer is ‘resistance to commodification’. By this he means the struggle to preserve, in the

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Journal of Contemporary History – SAGE

Published: Jan 1, 2010

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