Avant garde quotes:

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The avant-garde makes more sense to me. -- John Cale
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers. -- Brian Greene
I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies. -- Nicolas Cage
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
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
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
Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic. -- Ferran Adria
Avant-garde is French for bullshit -- John Lennon
The avant-garde is now stranded in the past. -- Mason Cooley
Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today. -- Andrew Sarris
The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde. -- Ed Benguiat
In short, it occurred to me that perhaps the only possible avant garde is the avant garden. -- Hakim Bey
Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times. -- Paul Laffoley
Holland is very good at avant garde, probably due to the Dutch character. Good at design. Experimentation sometimes works here very well. -- Eddy de Clercq
I expect the hip-hop audience to be avant garde. I want them to be where I'm at or beyond where I'm at. -- Nas
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
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
My dad was this sort of avant-garde guy who did all kinds of weird things. He was a true original and anybody who met him never forgot him. -- Paul Thomas Anderson
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
My favorite film is "Meshes in the Afternoon," a short avant garde film directed by Maya Deren. This was the first film that I saw that was actually directed by a woman. -- Chris Hegedus
I like African and avant-garde music, anything that's vaguely interesting. Hard rock I get a bit bored with because it's what I do. So anything outside of hard rock's fine by me. -- Roger Glover
I was part of the sort of avant guard tradition of John Cage and music concrete and pushing back the boundaries of avant garde classic pop rhythms. I think everyone brings something completely different to it. -- Anne Dudley
Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower. -- Ryan Kavanaugh
Alexander McQueen was one of the greatest fashion designers of his generation. His genius, sometimes provocative, admired and saluted by all, constantly opened new perspectives. Visionary and avant-garde, his creations took their inspiration from both tradition and timeless hyper-modernity. -- Francois-Henri Pinault
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
Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it -- Thurston Moore
It's easy to make something avant garde. To do something in the traditional way is much more brave in the sense that you're - your technique is so much more exposed because there's not all this flashy stuff to distract the viewer. -- Cary Fukunaga
Once you got Hollywood doing these kinds of movies and having all the, how you say, the tools to do it, and also to keep on finding new ways of doing it becomes - Hollywood can be avant garde on what concerns action. -- Violante Placido
You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. In the college, they were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. I just refused to do it. -- M.I.A.
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
Most of my avant garde fashion is saved for my videos and for the stage. In real life, I tend towards a classy, black Goth look. I love black, a few sparkles, false eyelashes and boots. But when I perform, I love fantasy and props. -- Jane Badler
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
When I was coming up with the Hal Hartley films, I was cast as a no one. I had no name visibility. I was working at a downtown post-performance-art, avant garde theater company and doing a couple things on television. But I was a total unknown. -- Martin Donovan
I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films. -- Eli Roth
Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world. -- Dan Graham
...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. -- Ray Bradbury
I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde. -- Matthew Shipp
No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole. -- Camille Paglia
I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill. -- Ravi Shankar
Men are definitely getting more avant-garde, experimenting with colours, patterns and fabrics. -- Jasmine Guinness
It is not necessary to be too avant-garde, because you risk not being understood. -- Domenico Dolce
I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18. -- Roy Harper
We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past. -- Jose Andres Puerta
When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful. -- Twyla Tharp
I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring. -- Bjarke Ingels
In a city, it's very hard to do a restaurant, an avant-garde-cuisine restaurant, where each year you need to change the whole menu. -- Ferran Adria
The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde. -- Zaha Hadid
Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms. -- Michael Haneke
I'm not commercial, I'm not for Special K cereal and I'm not a Wheaties boy; I'm a little bit more avant-garde, a little bit more out there. -- Johnny Weir
My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant. -- Sarah Hall
Everything changes but the avant-garde. -- Paul Valery
It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde. -- Phyllis McGinley
Avant-garde means never having to say you're sorry. -- Marc Ribot
The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking. -- Ferran Adria
Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde! -- Anne Rice
In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it's the experience that's the difference. -- Ferran Adria
I am neither in the past, nor avant-garde. My style follows life, -- Coco Chanel
Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it. -- Mason Cooley
Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything. -- Jeff Tweedy
I do not like to be thought of as avant-garde or some kind of didactic artist. -- Lucinda Childs
Yes, I am Aboriginal but I have the right to be avant-garde like any white artist. -- Tracey Moffatt
The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense. -- David Mamet
There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o'clock on a network. -- Bruno Heller
I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out. -- Edmund White
The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms. -- Clement Greenberg
You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last. -- Michael Scott
No matter how much people in fashion think we're so cool and avant-garde, for most fashion people, creativity is quite taboo. -- Riccardo Tisci
We live in an age where... Christian bashing is a popular indoor sport; and films mocking Jesus Christ are considered avant-garde. -- Pat Buchanan
The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular. -- Chuck Palahniuk
People wouldn't think of making avant-garde cuisine at home. When people play basketball at home, they can't play like Michael Jordan. -- Ferran Adria
I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much. -- Steven Soderbergh
I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness. -- Bat for Lashes
We will have to create an avant-garde.... We could have a Union for the enlarged Europe, and a Federation for the avant-garde. -- Jacques Delors
The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. -- Herbert Marcuse
I've always had the sensation that people in America are always avant-garde. Very attentive to all the new innovations. But it's very specialized. -- Sergio Leone
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
Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3. -- Igor Stravinsky
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. -- Seamus Heaney
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
There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself--the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered. -- Witold Gombrowicz
I love to work with Julia [Holter] because our voices have a similar timbre, and she's very unique. She finds very avant-garde harmonies that I adore. -- Linda Perhacs
Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism. -- Robert Wyatt
There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground. -- Michael Eisner
I'm really attracted to music that sort of toes that line between pop and avant-garde, that pushes the envelope of what you can get in a pop song. -- Patrick Stump
Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory. -- Harmony Korine
When I started making dances in the '60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism. -- Twyla Tharp
When I came to New York in 1949, there was already an entire fresh avant-garde film movement blooming in New York and California. It was a very, very exciting period! -- Jonas Mekas
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new. -- Robert Morgan
Just because you are an architect and make decent buildings does not mean that you can suddenly become a set designer for one of the best avant-garde dancers in the world. -- Frank Gehry
I am not the avant-garde. I am the artist who comes after the advancing guard. I am more concerned with continuity of ideas and tradition than in inventing a unique imagery. -- Nathan Oliveira
Many people think of me as a modernist, as a radical in music, you know, someone who's always sort of at the avant-garde of musics, but I'm also quite a traditionalist. -- Gunther Schuller
There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this theres certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it. -- J. C. Chandor
There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it. -- J. C. Chandor
We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition- "the tradition of the new." Yesterdays avant-garde experiment is today's chic and tomorrows cliche. -- Richard Hofstadter
I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema veritÃ©, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in. -- George Lucas
Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values. -- Jamake Highwater
Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are "deconstructed and post-individual. -- Patrice Pavis
When you talk about avant-garde cuisine, the surprise factor is really important. For example, I love looking at blogs and the photos, but I'm not that keen on other people taking photos of my dishes. -- Ferran Adria
I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean? -- Eugene Ionesco
Avant-garde architects have never been able to depend on the support of the establishment, since the customary patrons of this most conservative and slowly moving art form have historically been resistant to innovation and experiment. -- Martin Filler

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