Well that was very slow start; Actually a very slow, painful and dull start: those like me, unfamiliar with the contorted lexicon of marxist critical theory, might be tempted to re-shuffle their "to read" pile every time they face this one, which would definitely be a mistake since after the first chapter it turns out to be very much readable! So if you browse the reviews looking for a guiding hand that could encourage you from the other shore, take note: by the end of the second chapter at the latest you will be past the strictest discussions of historicizing and ideology critique, and enter the more welcoming homeland of art theory proper.
What of the book itself then? Chances are, if you have any interest in the avant-gardes, you are already indirectly familiar with Burger's theory: in fact, although he does not feel the need trace it, there is within the avant-garde corpus itself many an example of art turning into life.
The crux of the argument goes something like this:
Art is not a perennial category, but what qualifies as art, and a forteriori as good art, is defined and conditioned by the world at large. Whereas in the middle-ages, art was subservient of other fields, in particular religion, it has subsequently evolved towards autonomy, that is it has ceased to be limited in the contents considered worthy of representation: from being restricted to religious themes, it evolves towards the representation of political power during the Renaissance, and with the rise of the bourgeois societies and the revolutions, it reaches an autonomous status proper.
What this means is that rather than being restricted in its subjects and methods, art, left to its own devices, becomes increasingly concerned with itself; Art about art, art for art's sake. Burger's original contention is that the apex of this process, the "turning point", he situate not with Baudelaire or the impressionists, but with aestheticism, in which art's autonomy and self-interest comes full circle, leaving the artists with a bitter taste of oblivion and pointlessness in the face of an art entirely withdrawn from the world, yes, fully independent, but also fully disconnected.
Enters the avant-garde: the only thing to do from the standpoint of aestheticism is to start a critique of this autonomy, a critique of art itself, as a concept (in Burger's lingo, as an institution) - process which will take the form of a systematic collapsing of the frontiers between art and life itself.
Think of the futurist serata, of Duchamp's ready-mades, of all the manifestos, of the narrowing divide between noise and music, of Russian productionism, of the obsession with architecture, and so on. All those quite clearly aim to either bring us to look at the real and see art (Duchamp) or to look at art and lead us to see the real (abolition of the footlights) - if others have seen contradictory tendancies in those two directions, it seems that to Burger both converge in the destruction of art as a category. Art was meant to become indistinguishable from life.
In terms of methodology, there is a consistent return to three categories taken to be constitutive of the art institution: function, production and reception, and sometimes a return to form and content. On the whole the "theory of art" Burger takes great pain to justify, constitutes a relatively small section of the 100 pages, and is scarcely illustrated.
On the other hand there is plentiful discussion of marxist and hegelian aesthetics, with short but gratifying (at least to the philistines of my ilk!) outlines of the thought of Adorno, Benjamin or Lukacs (despite the regretted absence of such a discussion of Bloch); Those seems to bring little to the argument, set aside I suppose an increased credibility in the marxoid circles, but I found them in a sense to offer a welcome background. At any rate this might well explain the accusation of Burger's being a "theory of the theory of art"...
All in all: should you read it? Well if you've read my review so far, probably! Its a bit tough for the first third of the book but gets much easier, and although you might be familiar with many of the concepts here developed, there is a good reason this book is so influential. Beyond the scope of marxist theory (and within too, I suppose!) it does a great job of outlining how much of a break the AG constituted, and offer a very credible explanation of what might have motivated such a shift.