Avant Garde Quotes

• An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Men, Expression, Cities

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• Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.

  Anton Chekhov

  Firsts, Life Is, Bad Times

  Letter to A.S. Suvorin, May 14, 1889.

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• Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

  Brian Eno

  Done, Research, Want

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• The avant-garde makes more sense to me.

  John Cale

  "Of Anger and Twitching: An Interview with John Cale". Interview with Andrew Phillips, www.popmatters.com. Jan 9, 2006.

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• I hate the terminology of "costume" because my clothes are not costumes at all. I think they're high fashion, avant-garde, and more couture, definitely, and yes, some of my pieces are not particularly wearable, but I wouldn't say they're costumes, I'd say they're more couture.

  Christian Siriano

  Fashion, Hate, Thinking

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• Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

  Neville Marriner

  Years, Today, Modern

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• Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

  Brian Greene

  Science, Mathematics, Composer

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• It's very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things.

  Andy Partridge

  Hands, Stones, Faces

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• I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

  Robert Wyatt

  Music, Swimming, Thinking

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• To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that music is, or understand it.

  Archie Shepp

  Play, Numbers, People

  "A Dialogue with Archie Shepp". Interview with Scott Cashman, www.archieshepp.net. December 10, 1990.

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• The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde.

  Ed Benguiat

  Looks

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• I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

  Henry Flynt

  Artist, Students, Painting

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• I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.

  Nicolas Cage

  Fiction, Fantasy, Horror

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• We must revolutionize our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes.

  Alexander Rodchenko

  Eye, Perception, Vision

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• The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Lonely, Progress, Fields

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• Avant-garde is French for bullshit

  John Lennon

  Art, Bullshit

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• The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room.

  El Lissitzky

  Badass, Inspiration, Bad Ass

  El Lissitzky (1968). “El Lissitzky: life, letters, texts”

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• If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age

  Karel Appel

  Art, Age, Barbarians

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• Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

  Ad Reinhardt

  Art, Simplify, Painter

  Ad Reinhardt, Marlborough Gallery (1970). “Ad Reinhardt: black paintings, 1951-1967”

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• I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad's buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music.

  Stuart Hamm

  Dad, Illinois, Cages

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• Avant-garde means never having to say you're sorry.

  Marc Ribot

  Love, Movie, Romantic

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• Life is like Avant Garde. It will make you uncomfortable, and leave the room. But always remember to come back and watch the artist bow.

  Valerie Cruz

  Life, Artist, Bows

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• More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth.

  Rosalind E. Krauss

  Zero, Past, Rejection

  Rosalind E. Krauss (1986). “The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths”, p.157, MIT Press

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• It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Hero, World

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• If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Trying, Littles, Painting

  Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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