The Avant-Garde and declining returns

[President Television]

Listen; just read the Wikipedia article on what it means and how it's used. It's a valid term, and useful for art historians. So it's French and sounds pretentious; so does Sartre.

I think that anyone calling themselves or their work "avant-garde" probably is a pretentious twat, but that has no bearing on the validity of the term itself.

I'll accept this.

[LMNO]

Yeah.  I think it was already said in this thread, but if not...


The term "avant-garde" should be used when referring to somone else's work, as it relates to other pieces in a given medium.  It should almost never be used when describing your own work.

[Z³]

I just want to chime in and say that the rant kind of reminds me of the comments Stockhausen made about 9-11.

[Cramulus]

ba ba ba BUMP

[Placid Dingo]

I haven't really thought this out, but maybe the art mediums themselves are the problem. Maybe artists are starting to reach the limits of what you can do with paint or with clay. Speaking as someone whose art knowledge is limited to the written word and what my brother (who is an artist) has explained to me, maybe what's needed is new mediums which use different stimuli. Some possibilities that come to mind are using your psyche as an art form. Developing a second personality or some interesting psychological issue would provide a novel method. Just a thought.

This is something that's come into my head a lot.

Banksy's been mentioned but only breifly. I think he's a fairly important figure becasue while he's widely thought of a graffiti articst, he's part of something called the post-graffiti movement which generally presents itself in aestetic modifications of public space in multiple forms.

Im interested in the idea of action as art.

Off to write an article on that actually.