Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde formulates the historical avant-garde not as a mere stylistic episode, but as a critical assault on art’s institutional autonomy within bourgeois society. The work’s central proposition is that movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism did not simply invent new formal procedures; they sought to abolish the separation between art and life by attacking the very category of “art” as a socially insulated sphere. Bürger’s argument therefore moves beyond conventional art history, where the avant-garde is often reduced to innovation, shock or aesthetic novelty, and instead treats it as a theoretical disclosure of the institution of art: the ensemble of museums, criticism, markets, academies and habits of reception that determine what counts as artistic experience. The scanned edition’s prologue stresses precisely this problem: the avant-garde cannot be understood by isolating individual works, since its meaning emerges from its attempt to transform the social function of art itself. As a case study, the readymade and Dadaist anti-art gesture become decisive: by presenting ordinary objects or disruptive acts as art, the avant-garde exposes aesthetic value as historically produced rather than naturally given. Yet Bürger’s conclusion is dialectical. The avant-garde’s failure to reintegrate art into everyday praxis does not render it irrelevant; rather, its very failure reveals the resilience of bourgeois autonomy and the capacity of institutions to absorb negation as cultural form. Thus, the avant-garde remains indispensable because it makes visible the contradiction between art’s emancipatory promise and its social containment.