Dominic Willsdon, The Avant-Garde and its Publics Speaker: Dominic Willsdon, Curator, Public Events at Tate Modern, tutor in aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, and faculty member of the London Consortium. Avant-garde art is often seen as being at odds with the general public, and deliberately so. Avant-garde artists are seen as making images and objects that are wilfully esoteric, even elitist, and contemptuous of common concerns. But the history is more complicated. In this talk Dominic Willsdon argues that the avant-garde can be understood as a response to the specifically modern problem of trying to communicate with a general public, rather than the particular publics of earlier times. He considers how many avant-garde artists and artists' groups in the last 100 years can be seen as experimenting not just with new kinds of art but with new ideas about what it means to be a public.Further ReadingMichael Warner, chapter 2 in Publics and Counterpublics, Zone Books, NYC, 2002.Paul Wood, 'The Point is to Change It: The avant-garde in the early twentieth century', P. Wood ed., The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, Yale University Press, 1999, pp.183-203