Avant Garde Quotes - Page 3 | QuoteForever

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I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.
Jeff Koons / Artist
Art
Artist
Avant Garde
Connections
Enjoyed
Feelings
Honest
Pop Art
Surrealism
Art Done Always
Art Always Done
Connection
Pop
The Only Thing
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You want to embrace what the idea of pop music is. Not necessarily the stereotype of pop music; there was a time when you'd say 'pop music' and conjure up images of the Sweet, or Marc Bolan. That, to me, can be avant-garde still.
Cedric Bixler-Zavala /
Avant Garde
Pop Music
Stereotype
Conjure
Images
Marc
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Chefs have only been able to work in restaurants, high-end cuisine. Why? Why haven't they been able to find other scenarios? For those chefs who want to do avant-garde cuisine, should they be finding their income in a restaurant?
Ferran Adria / Chef
Avant Garde
Cuisine
Income
Restaurants
Scenarios
Chefs
High-End
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I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?
Nicolas Cage / Actor
Art
Avant Garde
Why Not
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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 / Musical Artist
Avant Garde
Numbers
Originals
People
Play
Yeah
Music People Know
Considered
Degree
Few People
Material
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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 /
Art
Avant Garde
Establishment
Innovation
Moving
Support
Architects
Art Form
Depend
Experiment
Slowly
Historically
Resistant
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In my head, I actually think my songs are pop songs. I think, 'Damn, that's a pop song!' I can practice in front of the mirror with my hairbrush for as long as I want to. But when it finally comes out, it sounds avant-garde to people.
M.i.a. / Artist
Avant Garde
Damn
Pop Song
Practice
Finally
Front
Mirror
Sounds
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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 / Film Writer
Art
Avant Garde
Directors
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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.
Sarah Hall / Novelist
Avant Garde
Exotic
Relevant
Rural
Spaces
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Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are "deconstructed and post-individual.
Patrice Pavis /
Avant Garde
Character
Theatre
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Melody was banned from music by the composers of the avant-garde. I was unique among them in always using and writing melody and so I think this is why I've shared my music, why they can have also pleasure, not only an interesting structure.
Krzysztof Penderecki /
Avant Garde
Banned
Interesting
Melody
Pleasure
Structure
Unique
Why
Among
Composers
Shared
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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 / Writer
Avant Garde
Important
Thinking
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It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics - how, if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes.
Richard Prince / Painter
Avant Garde
Fairly
Somewhat
Landscapes
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I remember my mother taking me to see the Picasso show in the 1940s, and I was impressed by the life and vibrancy of it all. It was a bit too avant-garde for most Londoners at the time, but since then, the city has become a centre for modern culture.
Richard Rogers / Architect
Avant Garde
Centre
Impressed
Modern Culture
Life Time Culture
Life Time Mother
Picasso
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I didn't have to inspire John toward the avant-garde; he did not need anything from me. That is why it's so interesting that critics decided to dislike me. At some point the members of the quartet felt it was time for a change, and left on their own.
Alice Coltrane / Jazz Pianist
Avant Garde
Critics
Dislike
Inspire
Time Change Me
Change Time Me
Quartet
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In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.
Yayoi Kusama / Artist
Avant Garde
Book
Countryside
Georgia
Impressed
Information
Old Books
Shop
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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 / Teacher
Art
Art World
Avant Garde
Gaudy
Hero
Imagery
Scorned
Soup
Warhol
Admit
Time Art World
Andy
Artists
Campbell
Cans
Dead
Commercial
High
High Time
Incorporated
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For the name Lion Babe, we are a little avant-garde, a little left. And with bands like Blondie, Pink Floyd, or Jamiroquai, you don't know they're bands, you just kind of hear the name and you're like 'What is it?' so that was the kind of thing we wanted to do.
Jillian Hervey /
Avant Garde
Band
Names
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But this is where you get all the market research and things get in danger of becoming formulaic, and where you depend on brands and getting recognised actors. It's the thing that precludes risk very often, otherwise everyone would be avant-garde all over the place.
Colin Firth / Film Actor
Avant Garde
Risk
Would Be
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I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop.
Autre Ne Veut /
Avant Garde
Format
Monk
Philip
Pop Song
Cool Music People
Backing
Flop
Glass
Terry
Tracks
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Futurism eventually got marred by its link to Fascism, but early on, it was totally avant-garde, and I wanted to dream a phantom link from the early futurists to the politically radical Italy of the 1970s, a time of fun, play, subversion - if also violence and mayhem.
Rachel Kushner / Writer
Avant Garde
Fascism
Mayhem
Subversion
Italy
Link
Phantom
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I think, on the rap side of life, I've always been inspired by and respected Missy Elliott for a long time. She's funny and created an image for herself that was non-sexualized but was really interesting and really cool and really kind of avant-garde in a lot of ways.
K. Flay /
Avant Garde
Inspired
Long Time
Created
Herself
Image
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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 / Philosopher
Avant Garde
Encounters
Landscape
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In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.
Yoko Ono / Artist
Artist
Avant Garde
Jazz
People
Rocks
Territory
Music People Jazz
Artists
Belonged
Music People Rock
Just Kind
Protecting
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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 / Essayist
Art
Avant Garde
Views
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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 / Fashion Designer
Avant Garde
Couture
Terminology
Costume
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I have pictures of my grandmother from the 1920s and '30s in avant-garde dresses that looked like they could have come from the House of Worth or Lucien Lelong. She would never say if they were couture, but I do recall her telling me, 'All my clothes and shoes came from Paris.'
Kevin Kwan /
Avant Garde
Couture
Dresses
Recall
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I watched a lot of avant-garde films, like Maya Deren's work, and I love film's technical ability to do things that are impossible in real life. It's related to the way collage allows you to manipulate reality and the hierarchies that are inherent in our awful but amazing world.
Wangechi Mutu / Artist
Avant Garde
Inherent
Manipulate
Real Life
Related
Life Love Work
Collage
Hierarchies
Technical Ability
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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.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Avant Garde
Inspire
Mass
Recognition
Respectable
Life Art Work
Double
Life Work Art
Imitators
Official
Receive
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I always wanted to experience what performance would be like without the fourth wall, so I formed a company in Australia, and we did avant-garde theater, playing with gender norms, conversations about race - we just had a box of issues that we wanted to subvert with our stories, with dance.
Deobia Oparei /
Australia
Avant Garde
Fourth
Conversations
Formed
Norms
Subvert
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There is absolutely no point in not being a populist. What I feel emboldened to do is to take something which is a minority interest and make it accessible without dumbing it down. I'm such an enthusiast for peculiar things, things that are perhaps a bit avant-garde, and try and involve everyone.
Lee Hall / Playwright
Avant Garde
No Point
Peculiar
Populist
Enthusiast
Accessible
Involve
Minority
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When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. Crappy rock bands, avant-garde things where we'd, like, 'wanna go against the norm, man.'
Jeff Buckley / Singer-Songwriter
Avant Garde
Electric
Electric Guitar
Norm
Rock Bands
Singing
Six
Acoustic
Wanna
Crappy
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The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.
Edward Albee / Playwright
Funny
Approach
Avant Garde
Childlike
Fun
Innocence
Liberating
Surprise
Theater
Apply
Aside
Bold
Iconoclastic
Standard
Putting
Terms
Responses
Wildly
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There's a bit of a new guard of contemporary classical musicians in New York, and we play a lot of different kinds of music together. We do pop studio sessions, and we'll also play John Cage and more avant-garde work. We're developing a language of music that comes with a lot of different styles, different kinds of work.
Caroline Shaw /
Avant Garde
Contemporary
Developing
Different Kinds
Work Music Together
Cage
Classical
Guard
Styles
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When I started saxophone, my dad took me to my uncle's church, and I started playing there, too. At its best, music serves a greater purpose, and that showed me a whole other side to spiritual jazz, one which you can hear in the music - the gospel and blues feel, the soul that's embedded into the more avant-garde records.
Kamasi Washington /
Avant Garde
Embedded
Saxophone
Gospel
Best Music Dad
Blues
Uncle
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My father's rooms, as a child, were a very exciting place to be. Not only because of the beautiful models who were coming to be photographed for Vogue or The Sunday Times but also because of the very avant-garde furniture that he had made. He made designs for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 at Caernarfon Castle.
David Linley /
Avant Garde
Furniture
Models
Rooms
Sunday
Wales
Castle
Coming
Designs
Photographed
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In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned.
Ravi Shankar / Musician
Avant Garde
Composer
Electronic Music
Heritage
Identity
India
Jealously
Orthodox
Music Believe Me
Classical
Destroyer
Electronic
Getting
Learned
Mixed
Performer
Protecting
Tried
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In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'
Jonas Mekas / Filmmaker
Avant Garde
Cinema
Film Noir
Little Bit
Narrative
Noir
Spaghetti
Term
Terminology
Western
Established
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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 / Art Critic
Art
Avant Garde
Culture
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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 /
Imagination
Avant Garde
Natural Elements
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