CAMILLE PAGLIA ON ANDY WARHOL AND THE END OF AVANT GARDE

«The followers of Lacan Derrida and Foucault far from bing political and intellectual sophisticates are the real fossilized reactionnaries of our time. They seized on and dogged to death ideas that were totally passé in America well before 1970. Foucault spoke of Beckett Wainting for Godot as the pivotal liberating experience of his generation of Parisians emerging form existentialism. When I saw that play in 1966 in college I recognized it as a repressive anxiety-formation of defunct modernism which the Sixties revolution energized by rock had swept completely away. At that moment in America popular culture rude, vital, brassy had triomphed. Warhol and Oldenberg reanimating the commercial motifs of our daily like had killed the European avant-garde forever».


-Camille Paglia.