Top 100 Quotes About Avant
#1. 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
#2. I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill.
Ravi Shankar
#3. Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
Terry Eagleton
#4. I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white.
Scott Walker
#5. 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
#7. 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.
Robert Wyatt
#8. Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.
Ferran Adria
#9. 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
#11. Apparently the Ministerium Tenebrae had decided to conquer the region using the unusual twin-pronged attack of zombies and avant-garde artwork.
Jonathan L. Howard
#12. 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
#13. 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.
Paul Thomas Anderson
#14. The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Seamus Heaney
#15. Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today.
Andrew Sarris
#16. In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it's the experience that's the difference.
Ferran Adria
#17. Peepo Choo is avant-garde! ... It is both comedy and drama! It is both the wildest fiction and the most sobering reality! It's about love and hate! About passion! About being human! It's about life!!!
Felipe Smith
#18. Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind.
Horace Mann
#19. There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground.
Michael Eisner
#20. Only the dead are truly smart, truly cool. Nothing touches them. While I live, however, I side with bumbling suffering crooked life, with anger rather than boredom, with sweet lust, hunger & carelessness ... against the icy avant-guard & its fashionable premonitions of the sepulcher.
Hakim Bey
#21. The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde.
Ed Benguiat
#22. 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
#23. The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.
Chuck Palahniuk
#24. I know the name of Turkey's leading avant-guard publication. I know that John Quincy Adams married for money. I know that Bud Abbott was a double-crosser, that absentee ballots are very popular in Ireland, and that dwarves have prominent buttocks.
A. J. Jacobs
#25. I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness.
Bat For Lashes
#26. I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.
Roy Harper
#27. I've said it since the day he made the sacrifice to hit the campaign trail: Voters crave the anti-status-quo politician. Everything about Donald Trump's campaign, it's avant-garde. He is crushing it in the polls.
Sarah Palin
#28. 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
#29. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.
Clement Greenberg
#30. 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.
Gia Coppola
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. Once you got Hollywood doing these kinds of movies and having all the, how you say, the tools to do it, and also to keep on finding new ways of doing it becomes - Hollywood can be avant garde on what concerns action.
Violante Placido
#35. It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.
Michael Foley
#36. The avant-garde makes more sense to me.
John Cale
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Patrick Stump
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. He's an avant-gardener whose great work includes the famous minimalist garden at Kew which was just a daisy and three wittily arranged grass stems.
Ben Moor
#43. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#44. There is nothing more profitable than the extreme avant garde.
Silvia Hartmann
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.
Mason Cooley
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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.
Damien Chazelle
#51. You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. In the college, they were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. I just refused to do it.
M.I.A.
#52. Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.
Harold Rosenberg
#53. The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens
#54. In short, it occurred to me that perhaps the only possible avant garde is the avant garden.
Hakim Bey
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.
Jose Andres
#58. There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself
the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered.
Witold Gombrowicz
#59. 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
#60. 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.
Ferran Adria
#61. I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.
Eli Roth
#62. I didn't have any set idea of what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to tell stories that meant something to me, but I never said I was going to be the weird, avant-garde guy.
Richard Linklater
#63. When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.
Twyla Tharp
#64. 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
#65. Others can't stand to revise; instead they decide they're avant-garde, so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now ... well, garde.)
Mary Karr
#66. 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
#67. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.
Gyorgy Ligeti
#68. There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o'clock on a network.
Bruno Heller
#69. The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.
Zaha Hadid
#70. It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.
Jonny Greenwood
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Alexander McQueen was one of the greatest fashion designers of his generation. His genius, sometimes provocative, admired and saluted by all, constantly opened new perspectives. Visionary and avant-garde, his creations took their inspiration from both tradition and timeless hyper-modernity.
Francois-Henri Pinault
#75. 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
#76. I've bought these peanuts before. They're round, cubical, pock-marked, seamed. Broken peanuts. A lot of dust at the bottom of the jar. But they taste good. Most of all I like the packages themselves. You were right, Jack. This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.
Don DeLillo
#77. 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.
Nas
#78. Everything changes but the avant-garde.
Paul Valery
#79. 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.
Igor Stravinsky
#80. Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.
Mason Cooley
#81. There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.
J. C. Chandor
#82. It was nice to kill time. But the time buries us before... (On a beau tuer le temps, - Il nous enterre avant)
Charles De Leusse
#83. The Avant Gardener feeds flowers to his manure and charges prices he believes are not to be sniffed at
Dean Cavanagh
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.
Nicolas Cage
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I am neither in the past, nor avant-garde. My style follows life,
Coco Chanel
#90. 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
#91. Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.
Michael Haneke
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. It's easy to make something avant garde. To do something in the traditional way is much more brave in the sense that you're - your technique is so much more exposed because there's not all this flashy stuff to distract the viewer.
Cary Fukunaga
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.
Camille Paglia
#98. 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
#99. Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it
Thurston Moore
#100. When you talk about avant-garde cuisine, the surprise factor is really important. For example, I love looking at blogs and the photos, but I'm not that keen on other people taking photos of my dishes.
Ferran Adria
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