Top 44 Avant-Garde Quotes

I like to wear things that are daring but also not seem too avant-garde.

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.’

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

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.

I like things that are avant-garde, but at the same time I can also go downtown edgy.

No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.

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.

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.

I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don’t want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness.

I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.

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.

Bands on tour are very good cultivators of what’s the avant-garde of comedy.

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.

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.

Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.

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.

The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.

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.

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.

I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.

What guides me is to do work that’s more avant-garde – things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

In London, I did feel a pressure to be more avant-garde than I wanted.

What’s very funny is when you see amateurs filming something, they do some things no professionals would dare to do. They instinctively do things that are very avant-garde and useful.

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.

I took one acting class as an undergrad, and I loved it. I was in a very avant-garde play at UCLA about a closeted, married homosexual. I played his father.

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.

I don’t think all music that is considered ‘avant-garde’ is bad, but it’s definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.

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.

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.

People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It’s like when you’ve seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.

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.

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.

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.

‘Network’ was formidable in the sense that I was playing a strong, avant-garde woman.

I love doing supercrazy, avant-garde but still stunning looks.