Renaot Poggolio, a theorist on the avant-garde, comes to the same conclusions I that did that Canadian avant-garde filmmakers end up by converting reality into phantasm.
Poggolio (an Italian critic, which is an important qualifier in that the Italian avant-gardists played an important role in the dissemination of the art) quotes a social critic, Christopher Coudwell:
…a dissolution of …social values…results in the art work’s ceasing to be an art work and becomes mere private phantasy. |
He sees the popularity of Shakespeare as the positive end of individualism, whereas the avant-garde pushed this individualism to such an extreme that it caused the disintegration of art instead.
Somehow, Shakespeare was able to include society into his eccentricities, and the avant-garde just resorted to phantasm and phantasy.