Subversive artistic strategies of the avant-garde and the crisis of modern experience

The purpose of this essay is to present several important changes in the sphere of modern experience and the strategies of the neo-avant-garde which correspond to them. Subversive practices of the avant-garde, as well as the neo-avant-garde, are inscribed in the new systems of cultural functionalization, which in many of their manifestations, on the one hand, lead to the loss of art’s critical potential. On the other hand, however, the potency and the staying power of the avant-garde in its new form – despite numerous declarations of its death – lie in its critical re-immersion in contemporary human experience and in preserving the tension between engagement and critical distance characteristic of the experience of late modernity. This, however, requires the reworking of the old formulas of anti-modernist protest and the fragile alliances with postmodernism.