Top 249 Avant-Garde Quotes & Sayings

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

Product design is fed by the avant-garde.

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.

Cornelius Cardew very famous in Britain, because he was the darling of the avant-garde, and he played in a band called AMM, which was an improvising band in the '60s. Paul McCartney used to come watch them. Later on in life, he became disenchanted with avant-garde music, because he felt it couldn't reach the public. It didn't have a wide enough appeal. So he'd take these tunes of old English folk songs and write Stalinist lyrics over the top of them. I do think that when he changed to folk songs, he actually lost the tiny audience he already had, which is quite interesting.

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.

There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o'clock on a network.

My work first engaged with the early russian avant-garde; the paintings of moholy-nagy, el lissitzky's 'prouns' and naum gabo's sculptures, but in particular with the work of kasimir malevitch - he was an early influence for me as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design.

I like to wear things that are daring but also not seem too avant-garde.

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.

'Network' was formidable in the sense that I was playing a strong, avant-garde woman.

Experiment - exercising to see the result. We planned Europa not as an experiment in this sense but as a work of art. Yet The Eye and the Ear was done as a consciously designed experiment. Not every avant-garde dealt with experiments and not every experiment equalled avant-garde.

I love doing supercrazy, avant-garde but still stunning looks.

Yes, I am Aboriginal but I have the right to be avant-garde like any white artist.

I am neither in the past, nor avant-garde. My style follows life.

Avant-garde is French for bullshit

I do not like to be thought of as avant-garde or some kind of didactic artist.

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.

My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

In short, it occurred to me that perhaps the only possible avant garde is the avant garden.

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

Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.

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.

The avant-garde has always existed throughout the history of mankind. The good things from the avant-garde last and eventually, after many years, become tradition and people forget they were ever part of the avant-garde. The kitchen is a living discipline, always evolving, and there will always be cutting edge things that over the years, ends up being part of tradition.

The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future ... The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.

The majority of people probably think that Damien Hirst is avant-garde. Look at the amount of people who say 'What is this rubbish? Who is running our galleries? Why are they spending all this money on the avant-garde?' That doesn't make it avant-garde to me.

It is not necessary to be too avant-garde, because you risk not being understood.

The avant garde is so narcissistic.

It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.

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

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.

In London, I did feel a pressure to be more avant-garde than I wanted.

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.

The avant-garde makes more sense to me.

I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.

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

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.

The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.

No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.

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

I'm certainly not in the business of making anything or anyone seem avant-garde. I make them feel beautiful.

My more risky or avant garde music is not that well known to a wider audience, but I wish it was.

We will have to create an avant-garde.... We could have a Union for the enlarged Europe, and a Federation for the avant-garde.

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

More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre.

In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it's the experience that's the difference.

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

I have always had an audience for my music, even in the very avant garde, crazy times.

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.

I like things that are avant-garde, but at the same time I can also go downtown edgy.

Bands on tour are very good cultivators of what's the avant-garde of comedy.

The avant-garde feel important, but they hardly understand what they're doing.

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

Men are definitely getting more avant-garde, experimenting with colours, patterns and fabrics.

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?

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.

I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill.

It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.

Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today.