Искусство авангарда перед публикой и критикой (О книге Дэвида Коттингтона «Кубизм в тени войны»)
Avant-garde art in front of public and criticism (On David Cottington’s book “Cubism in the Shadow of War”)

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores the issues of the general theory of avant-garde and contains the interpretation of David Cottington’s book “Cubism in the Shadow of War. The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905–1914”, its methodological strategies and “inner philosophy”. D. Cottington’s approach to the ideological problems of the avant-garde is investigated in the context of contemporary social sciences, focusing on the issue of complicated relationships between Modern art and conservative philosophy. Developing the form of analysis introduced in A. V. Rykov’s book “Postmodernism as ‘Radical Conservatism’: The Problem of Art Theory Conservatism and American Theory of Contemporary Art of 1960-1990s” (Saint-Petersburg, 2007) the present paper considers D. Cottington’s study as an example of contemporary art historical thinking, a close examination of which can reveal the “political unconscious” of contemporary social sciences. The author brings into comparison D. Cottington’s views on avant-garde and the theory of Modernism, elaborated by the Soviet philosopher and art theorist Mikhail Alexandrovich Lifshitz (1905–1983). Both M. Lifshitz and D. Cottington attempted to reconstruct the complex dialectics of political and cultural radicalism, paying special attention to Henri Bergson’s and Maurice Barres’s heritage and to the problem of anti-rationalism of modernist thought.

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