Psychostrategies of avant-garde art

Donald Kuspit offers a radical new interpretation of avant-garde art based on a psychological understanding of it. Avant-garde art, Kuspit suggests, is a response to the modern crowd, which undermines and destroys the sense of self. The artist tries to restore his sense of self through one or more of several techniques: identifying with his medium; demonstrating the crowd´s perversity and insanity; making hallucinatory art that shows his own insanity; or transcending the crowd altogether by escaping into a world of abstraction. An extensive reinterpretation of Manet keynotes the book.
I. Reasons for anxiety and ambivalence: tradition, sexuality, the crowd (the exemplary case of Manet) II. The anal universe of the crowd. III. Identification with the medium: the consolation of matter. IV. Hallucinatory insanity: the way to another reality V. The geometry of heaven, the energy of Angels: to soar at last beyond the crowd.