Lecture by Niels van Poecke (Erasmus University Rotterdam) (English Spoken)
THE COMEBACK OF THE AVANT-GARDE: ON METAMODERNISM AND POPULAR CULTURE
What is the new avant-garde? That is the provoking question central to this year's edition of S.O.T.U. - a question that immediately raises other questions. Why did the avant-garde, once booming in western art and culture in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, for instance disappear? Did it re-emerge recently and if so, what is it that constitutes the new avant-garde?
In his lecture, cultural sociologist Niels van Poecke (Erasmus University Rotterdam) will argue that indeed the notion of the avant-garde, and related concepts like ‘authenticity', ‘utopianism', ‘desire', and ‘the sublime', is making a comeback - in (visual) arts and popular culture. In contrast to recent proclamations that popular culture is suffering from ‘retromania' - hence is bound to look at the past - he will maintain that a new generation of artists is instead motivated to articulate visions of the future.
Against the backdrop of a larger debate on ‘the end of postmodernism', Van Poecke will argue that these visions are characteristic of a new sensibility coined metamodernism by Dutch philosophers Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. Expressed in the work of many contemporary artists - from film maker Wes Anderson to visual artist David Thorpe, and from architects Herzog & de Meuron to music groups such as CocoRosie and The Knife - the metamodernist sensibility should be defined as both modernist and postmodernist, yet represents neither both. Instead, the metamodernist is suggestive of a sensibility that constantly negotiates between the modern and postmodern mindset - between utopianism and skepticism, hope and doubt, sincerity and irony - in search of new ground.
It is argued that this metamodern sensibility is also constitutive of the new avant-garde in the first two decades of the 21st century - endlessly balancing between authenticity and sincerity, DIY and Doing Things Together, hope and doubt, underground and mainstream, construction and deconstruction, engagement and detachment, idealism and pragmatism - into infinity...
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Niels van Poecke studied Sociology of Arts and Culture and Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Currently he is a lecturer and Ph.D. Candidate at the department of Art and Culture Studies at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC). In his Ph.D. project he focuses on the production, aesthetics and reception of new folk music in The Netherlands, U.K. and U.S.
