Modernism, the International and the Possibility of an Avant-garde. Discussion at the Prague Microfestival 2016, 15 May
Modernism, the International and the Possibility of an Avant-garde. Discussion at the Prague Microfestival 2016, 15 May

Summary/Abstract: Benjamin Tallis, Research Fellow, Institute of International Relations, Prague (Moderator) Jan Bělíček, Journalist and Commentator, A2larm.cz Online Magazine, Prague Dita Malečková, Scholar in New Media, Art and Culture, Charles University, Prague Gregor Podlogar, Philosopher, Poet and Editor of Lyrikline.org, Ljubljana and Vienna Boris A. Novak, Poet, Playwright, Translator, Essayist and Scholar, Ljubljana Louis Armand, Charles University, Prague In his famous essay, ‘Tradition & the Individual Talent,’ T.S.Eliot wrote that any art of consequence changes its entire past and creates its own precursors; that it produces, in short, a retroactive constitution of necessity for the present state of affairs. Today, however, the internationalist project and the major centres of European cosmopolitanism that were the principal catalysts of this ‘necessity,’ are no longer what they were. The much vaunted conditions of the avant-garde during the period of political transformation in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe have solidified into a seemingly paradoxical tension between neo-nationalism and global capital, and the idea of the avant-garde has become little more than a rhetorical gesture in the aftermath of liberal humanism, existing today merely as a simulacrum of itself.

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