Art de Déconcentration

Abstract The paper attempts to establish a dialogue between advertising, the Yugoslav avant-garde and a theoretical discourse on the “death” of the avant-garde. In a first step, the trope of the avant-garde dying through its techniques being appropriated by advertising is briefly scrutinized. In a second step, the article demonstrates that the axes of exchange between Yugoslav avant-garde movements (Zenitism, Hypnism, Dadaism) and early advertising were multifold and irreducible to a simple matrix of originality and bad appropriation. Finally, the results of the analysis are considered from the perspective of “peripheral modernism” and their consequences for the grand death-discourse are scrutinized.