Quotes About Avant-garde

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand?

Frank [Zappa]'s music was never for the mass audience. His music contains specific kinds of information that you won't find elsewhere in rock and roll.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

I was horrified by modern 12-tone music. I said to myself, 'Maybe I can find something different... maybe salvation, liberation, is possible.

There isn't anything weird about my music.

Being a classical musician, you're doing many things anyway. One day you're doing Bach concerto and the next you're doing some avant-garde thing. It's just another hat that I'm allowed to wear.

As far as I know Misha wrote the first cyberpunk poetry.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

Be out of the mainstream. I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream?

I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.

I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Holland is very good at avant garde, probably due to the Dutch character. Good at design. Experimentation sometimes works here very well.

There has never been a great film unless it was created in the spirit of the experimental filmmaker.

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

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

My idea is always to avoid nostalgia.

Read something no one is reading, think something no one is thinking, and do something no one is doing.

Fashion is all about madness.

In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id.

Very advanced fashion almost joins up with having no fashion sense at all.

une Net artiste est une artiste pas nette

To be in a band, at least according to the rules of rock in the 1970s, one must know how to play an instrument. But rather than waste time solving that problem, No Wavers ignored it. The point was simply to make music, not to learn how first.