Woke on a Sudden Manhattan: Art, Space, and the Commodification of the New York Avant-Garde

This resentment towards culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and Puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood's health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences. - Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch 1930s 1936 – The first of Stalin’s Soviet Show trials take place, creating an international schism between Stalinists and Trotskyites. 1936 – Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in Paris while exiled from his native Germany. In 1936, Benjamin had written  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction  while exiled in Paris. He used the essay to examine the role of mass art, and particularly film, by charting the historical uses of art in relation to (and service of) the stat...

1951 – Paul Goodman’s essay “Advance-Guard Writing in America, 1900 - 1950” appears in the Kenyon Review. Goodman advocated for the formation of small counter-communities based on familiarity, sensitivity, and shared aesthetic concerns. Through the process of localized and community-specific artistic creation and consumption, these communities would together withstand the nullifying effects of Eisenhower’s America.         In the summer of 1951, critic Paul Goodman’s essay  Advance-Guard Writing in America: 1900 – 1950  appeared in the  Kenyon Review . In the same vein as Clement Greenberg’s essay from 1939, Goodman used the essay to argue the case of a cultivated counter-elite at odds with an increasingly intolerant mainstream majority, now less under threat from the fascist totalitarianism than a post-war American hegemony Goodman assessed as “shell-shocked” and alienated. In the aftermath of war, and in the face of new Cold War real...

“I’m not arguing that writing is therapy … [but] what interest me in it is that testament can occur in no specious sense, that we’re not writing simply to exercise ourselves but … it’s lovely to give witness to what you have as experience of the world, no matter what the terms of that experience may be.” – Robert Creeley, speaking at St. Mark’s Church, 1967 *      *     * LeRoi Jones and Diane DiPrima, Cedar Tavern 1960 1960 – Donald Allen edits “The New American Poetry: 1945 – 1960,” published by Grove Press. It is seen as a response to Donald Hall’s “New Poets of England and America” and showcases the poetry of the New York School, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Black Mountain Poets.       In the spring of 1960, Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review published  The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 , an anthology overseen by Frank O’Hara’s editor Donald Allen. The anthology brought together fo...