Top 1200 Avant Garde Art Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

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

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

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

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?

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I don't think all music that is considered 'avant-garde' is bad, but it's definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.

On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work.

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.

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

I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.

I took one acting class as an undergrad, and I loved it. I was in a very avant-garde play at UCLA about a closeted, married homosexual. I played his father.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. And I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

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

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

I've hardly had an avant-garde career ... If you're going to make a film, you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you're doing it for the first time.

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

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

Avant garde" has become a ubiquitous label, eclectically applied to any type of art that is anti-traditional in form. At its simplest, the term is sometimes taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't think I am avant-garde. I made a lot of creations and created harmony with my fabrics, but I was not like Balenciaga, for example, although he was, of course, a great inspiration.

I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.

Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.

The first four years, I worked exclusively in the theater. I did a great deal of different types of acting - avant garde and classical work. So, it was a very broad spectrum.

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.

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.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.

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.

Only in our failures are we absolutely alone. Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free. Losers may be the avant garde of the modern age.

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.

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

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

Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names.

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.

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.

I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness.

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

As a teenager, I wanted to be sophisticated and avant-garde, and I was really judgmental. But when you're a teenager, you're fearless because you don't know the repercussions to anything.

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.

Publishing has gone very middlebrow. It's turned its back on legacy of modernism and gone into a humanist mode. When people go through art school they are exposed to the history of the avant-garde, and there's a general understanding that what you're doing as an artist is to a large extent, not just regurgitating that history, but engaging with it. There's this denial of that in the mainstream publishing world.

The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

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

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

People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It's like when you've seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.

When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.

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.