In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the production of literary and cultural manifestoes enjoyed a veritable boom and accompanied the rise of many avant-garde movements. Legitimizing the Artist considers this phenomenon as a response to a more general crisis of legitimation that artists had been struggling with for decades. The crucial question for artists; confronted by the conservative values of the dominant bourgeoisie and the economic logic of triumphant capitalism; was how to justify their work in terms that did not reduce art to a mere commodity.In this work Luca Somigli discusses several European artistic movements - decadentism; Italian futurism; vorticism; and imagism - and argues for the centrality of the works of F.T. Marinetti in the transition from a fin de sieacute;cle decadent poetics; exemplified by the manifestoes of Anatole Baju; to a properly avant-garde project aiming at a complete renewal of the process of literary communication and the abolition of the difference between producer and consumer. It is to this challenge that the English avant-garde artists; and Ezra Pound in particular; responded with their more polemical pieces. Somigli suggests that this debate allows us to rethink the relationship between modernism and post-modernism as complementary ways of engaging the loss of an organic relationship between the artist and his social environment.
#3810671 in eBooks 2014-11-24 2014-11-24File Name: B00T8VNZWC
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