As previously mentioned though Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) has shaped the understanding of the avant-garde, there is a need to take the discussion further. It is argued that:

Bürger's basic assumption that one singular intention, the intention of reintegrating art into the praxis of life, could be ascribed to the avant-garde as a whole came under attack. While the construction of an all-embracing frame had created the condition for the development of an inclusive theory of the avant-garde, its critique as an unreliable attribution applicable only to selected sections of the avant-garde called the very foundation of Bürger's theory into question. The neglect which Bürger's theory showed towards differences and contradictions between manifested "intentions" of the various avant-garde movements, the indifference also towards the historical process in which traditional art concepts were dismantled and a wealth of new art forms emerged, call for alternative perspectives of theorising the avant-garde today.

The significance of neo-avant-gardist interventions and innovations, however, even the historical significance of the act of "reinventing" the avant-garde after its global destruction in the repressive decades of the 1930s and 40s, remained as unexplored in these treatises as they did in the sweeping rejection which the neo-avant-garde suffered in Bürger's theory of 1974. The fact that artists of the neo-avant-garde exhibited in museums and galleries was sufficient evidence for Bürger to denounce the neo-avant-garde's protest gestures as "inauthentic" - an assessment that is easily discernible as just another consequence of Bürger's misleading definition of the avant-garde's basic intention.