My doctoral dissertation, supervised by Jérôme Glicenstein and defended in June 2022 at Paris 8 University, is available for download, together with its appendix volume, at https://hal.science/tel-04030910/
The book published in October 2025 by CNRS Éditions is a revised and condensed version of this work. While the dissertation offers more extensive details on certain events, individuals, and organizations discussed in the book, as well as on the methodology and sources employed, the book includes several additions and substantial revisions to the 2022 text.
Abstract
The State against the Norm:
The Turn of Public Institutions Towards Avant-Garde Art, 1959-1977
(West Germany, United States, France)
The 1960s and 1970s are commonly regarded as the period of transition from modern art to contemporary art. My research aims to characterize this change, not only in terms of stylistic evolutions, but as a profound reconfiguration of the institutional structures of the art field.
One of its main factors consists in the expansion of public intervention in the contemporary art field, following the general development of cultural policies in all the Western liberal democracies at that time. A crucial feature of this rapprochement between contemporary art and public institutions is the choice shared by many organizations to promote avant-garde art. Support to the most recent artistic innovations and recognition of their most unconventional aspects are the two faces of this evolution, which has also benefited to some radical historical avant-gardes that were previously neglected.
This reorientation represents a major break in the history of the avant-gardes, which originated in a radical opposition to any official authorities, and can explain the exhaustion of their dynamics at the end of the 1970s. It also marks a turning point in the long history of the relationship between state and culture, and can be seen as a symptom of a broader redefinition of high culture.
The investigation into the causes of this change has highlighted the determining role of the public intermediaries to whom artistic decisions are delegated, in order to prevent any state control on public tastes. Because these intermediaries draw their legitimacy primarily from the art field, their choices led to import the values of the avant-garde into public institutions.
From the end of the 1960s, this mechanism has been intensified by the effects of the increasing demands to democratize the art world: for lack of being able to fully answer these claims for cultural democracy (or in order to circumvent them), these intermediaries have emphasized their support to unconventional art as a mean to demonstrate, at least, their solidarity with the contemporary protests against sociocultural hierarchies.