The avant-garde and Aesthetic Values

Abstract

Does it make sense to speak of aesthetic values in avant-garde art? Is not the very formulation of the them e tainted with contradiction? After all, avant-garde artists have postulated repeatedly, and quite unambiguously, that it is not their aim to create aesthetic values; we do not want to have anything to do with aesthetic values — they used to add contemptuously. The presence of aesthetic values in art depends on its definite features. Until recently many of them were unanimously looked upon as the constitutive properties of art. Yet, it was exactly the avant-garde that called in question nearly all properties regarded earlier as the specific features of art. Perhaps, then, the problem posed in the title falls not only because of the postulated neutral, or even anti-aesthetic, attitude of the avant-garde, but also because the avant-garde is not art at all?