The End of the American Avant Garde American Social Experience Series [Paperback]

By 1966, the composer Virgil Thomson would write, Truth is, there is no avant-garde today. How did the avant garde dissolve, and why? In this thought-provoking work, Stuart D. Hobbs traces the avant garde from its origins to its eventual appropriation by a conservative political agenda, consumer culture, and the institutional world of art.

Hobbs provides ample grounds for readers to ponder the interplay between particular movements in the arts and a larger American culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A significant work for intellectual and cultural historians, this is a tight, . . . focused examination of an important aspect of recent American culture.