We need the avant-garde perspective but the avant-garde has disappeared. This is the starting point for any discussion of the avant-garde. Through a presentation of a few select episodes from the history of the euro-modernist avant-garde, French Surrealism and the Situationist International, I will argue for the necessity of the avant-garde’s radical critique but also present some remarks on its historical disappearance in order to better answer why the avant-garde was so quickly caught up and superseded by the society it wanted to destroy.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (Copenhagen) is an art historian and theorists working on the politics and history of the avant-garde, the politics of contemporary art and the revolutionary tradition. He wrote the text "The Self-Destruction of the Avant-Garde".