Avant Garde Quotes - Page 5

• The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Creating, Trying

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.6, Beacon Press

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• You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last.

  Michael Scott

  Art, Might, Lasts

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• 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

  Hip Hop, Want, Hips

  Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. December 6, 2006.

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• 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

  Mean, Theatre, Doe

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• 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

  Artist, Unique, Ideas

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• 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

  Afternoon, Saws, Firsts

  "Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Chris Hegedus – ‘Unlocking the Cage’". www.indiewire.com. January 23, 2016.

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• 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

  Thinking, Different, Pushing Back

  Source: www.chaoscontrol.com

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• The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.

  David Mamet

  Jingoism, Nonsense, Refuge

  David Mamet (2013). “Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama”, p.61, Vintage

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• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Height, Too Much

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

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• The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Views, Literature

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.19, Beacon Press

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• I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

  Louis Aragon

  Responsibility, Practice, Wings

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• I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.

  Edmund White

  Sincerity, Realism, Feels

  "A Conversation with Edmond White By Edmond White". The Review of Contemporary Fiction Interview, www.dalkeyarchive.com. Fall 1996.

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• Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!

  Anne Rice

  Vampire, Pretending, Humans

  "Interview With The Vampire". Book by Anne Rice, 1976.

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• 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

  Men, He Man, Share

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.70, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Radical

  "Listen Back To A 1988 Conversation With Composer Gunther Schuller". "Fresh Air", www.npr.org. June 22, 2015.

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• I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.

  Matthew Shipp

  Hatred, Jazz, Imagine

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• The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.

  Mason Cooley

  Past, Stranded

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• We live in an age where... Christian bashing is a popular indoor sport; and films mocking Jesus Christ are considered avant-garde.

  Pat Buchanan

  Christian, Sports, Religious

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• I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself.

  Arnold Newman

  Art, Trying, Different

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• 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

  Elements, Taste, Kind

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• Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

  Mason Cooley

  Art, Care, Modernism

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• There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Desire, Doe

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• I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.

  George Lucas

  Character, Tone, Cinema

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• 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

  Unique, Voice, Harmony

  Interview with Ian Cohen, pitchfork.com. February 20, 2014.

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• Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything.

  Jeff Tweedy

  Mean, Never Change, Changed

  "Wilco". Interview with Jason Crock, pitchfork.com. May 7, 2007.

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