Another characteristically modern artistic culture is definable by two aspects: a principled sense of alienation from significant aspects of existing reality and a conscious commitment to overcoming the deficiencies of existing reality by artistic means of a completely novel character. One of the distinguishable types of this artistic culture is the bohemian avant-garde, which tends to be alienated from all rational and utilitarian aspects of social organization and cultural tradition and aims to create a …
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showed last 75 words of 480 total
…the avant-garde culture are also reactions, by artists and aesthetically sensitized intellectuals, to the development of the modern industrial society; a society highly rationalized and, in spite of its ideology celebrating the "common people," continuingly stratified. The anti-artistic avant-garde appears to be a "shamanistic" reaction against the professionalization of art, and, like the mediumistic trances of traditional cultures, its efforts may prove to be a socially innocuous (or conserving) ritual that is perhaps psychologically refreshing.