Avant Garde Art Quotes

#1. 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

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

Mason Cooley

#3. The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

Robert Morgan

#4. 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

#5. The evidence of conversion is not a decision card filled out, it's a life being lived out.

Paul Washer

#6. Go in fear of abstractions.

Ezra Pound

#7. Fact is one of our finest fictions.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#8. The transgressive quality of love is the transgressive quality of art ... From the Pre-Raphaelites till now, the avant-garde has always been characterized by radical views of love and sex.

Rod Dubey

#9. You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last.

Michael Scott

#10. My recovery is the single greatest accomplishment of my life. Without that, the rest of my life would have fallen apart.

Martin Sheen

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.

Steven Soderbergh

#14. Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.

Ryan Kavanaugh

#15. Well, are you going to motivate people to bring peace to war-torn nations, or are you going to motivate people to join a cult and drink the Kool-Aid?

Libba Bray

#16. 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

#17. Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!

Morrissey

#18. 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.

Stefan Themerson

#19. 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

#20. When I was coming up with the Hal Hartley films, I was cast as a no one. I had no name visibility. I was working at a downtown post-performance-art, avant garde theater company and doing a couple things on television. But I was a total unknown.

Martin Donovan

#21. I don't think fame is that important to me.

Kourtney Kardashian

#22. Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?

Hugo Ball

#23. When we paint the picture of our salvation for others to see, we may use different colors, textures, and shapes on the edges of the parchment. But in the center can only be a cross. Anything else cheapens grace and cheats the believer.

Beth Moore

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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