These avant garde quotes will inspire you. Avant-Garde new and unusual or experimental ideas, especially in the arts, or the people introducing them.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging avant garde quotes, avant garde sayings, and avant garde proverbs.
Famous Avant Garde Quotes
- “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
- “The avant-garde makes more sense to me.” ~ John Cale
- “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
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“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 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
- “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
- “Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.” ~ Brian Greene
- “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
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“The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde.” ~ Ed Benguiat
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.” ~ Nicolas Cage
- “We must revolutionize our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes.” ~ Alexander Rodchenko
- “Avant-garde is French for bullshit” ~ John Lennon
- “The room is there for the human being – not the human being for the room.” ~ El Lissitzky
- “If I paint like a barbarian, it’s because we live in a barbarous age” ~ Karel Appel
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“Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” ~ Ad Reinhardt
- “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
- “Avant-garde means never having to say you’re sorry.” ~ Marc Ribot
- “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
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“The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell’s soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.” ~ Camille Paglia
- “It’s important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir
- “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
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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
- “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.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir
- “I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad’s buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music.” ~ Stuart Hamm
- “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.” ~ Ferran Adria
- “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
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“Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires … How avant-garde!” ~ Anne Rice
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“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
- “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
- “The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.” ~ David Mamet
- “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.” ~ Jurgen Habermas
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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
- “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 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
- “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
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“Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “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
- “Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn’t mean anything.” ~ Jeff Tweedy
- “We live in an age where… Christian bashing is a popular indoor sport; and films mocking Jesus Christ are considered avant-garde.” ~ Pat Buchanan
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“The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “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
- “Music is a language, and it’s like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like ‘new music,’ ‘avant-garde,’ or something like that, I think it’s like cutting out half the dictionary.” ~ Archie Shepp
- “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
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“I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.” ~ Matthew Shipp
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“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
- “Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you’ll find their work only at art theaters.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved.” ~ Martin Filler
- “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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“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
- “I really didn’t know what to think about the veil. Deep down I was very religious but as a family we were very modern and avant-garde. I was born with religion. At the age of six I was already sure I was the last prophet. This was few years before the revolution.” ~ Marjane Satrapi
- “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.” ~ Robert Hughes
- “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
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“Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.” ~ Ferran Adria
- “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.” ~ Alan J. Pakula
- “There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself–the three musketeers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered.” ~ Witold Gombrowicz
