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title = "Avant-garde emerging"
glassblowers = ["marcellmars.md", "tomislavmedak.md"]
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In his influential theory of the avant-garde, Peter Bürger (1984) roots its development in the critique of autonomy the art seemingly achieved with the rise of capitalist modernity between the eighteenth and late nineteenth century. The emergence of bourgeois society allowed artist to attain autonomy in a triple sense: art was no longer bounded to the representational hierarchies of the feudal system, it was now produced individually and by individual fiat of the artist and it was produced for individual appreciation of universally all members of the society. 

Starting from the ideal of aesthetic autonomy enshrined in the works of Kant and Schiller, art eventually severed links from its boundedness to the social reality and made this freedom into its subject matter. As the markets for literary and fine artworks were emerging, the artists were gaining material independence from feudal patronage, the institutions of bourgeois art were being established, '[a]estheticism had made the distance from the praxis of life the content of works.' 

The capitalism was becoming the dominant reality, yet the freedom of art was working to suppress the incursion of that reality into art. It was that distance between the art and life that historical avant-gardes would undertake to eliminate when they took their aim at the bourgeois art. With the 'pathos of historical progressiveness on their side', the early avant-gardes were thus out to relate and transform art and life in one go.