Word: avant
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Signac was also an energetic and talented writer, an avid reader and bibliophile, and an ardent backer of the avant-garde in the days when that word actually meant something. "The golden age has not passed," ran the subtitle he appended to an enormous didactic canvas, In the Time of Harmony, 1893-95. "It lies in the future." The picture set out to depict the joys of anarchist cooperation: free love, picnics, games of boule on the beach, farm labor made easy by a steam-powered reaper in the distance. What in fact lay in the future was the trenches...
Still, true social and political revolution cannot occur without the widespread support of the public, which was not attained until the popularization of rock and roll. Although lacking a distinctive corollary in the art world, early rock and roll still was still driven by the same motivation of avant-garde art: questioning blind adherence to societal norms. What began as a search for personal identity among post-war teenagers resulted in a blow to the sanitized, suburban nuclear family unit of Eisenhower’s America. The resounding popularity of rock and roll icons Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry...
...decades, avant-garde art and rock and roll strove towards the common goal of social and political upheaval. Even prior to the creation of rock and roll, music and revolutionary art have made natural bedfellows. Five years before Marcel Duchamp drew a goatee on the Mona Lisa, Luigi Russolo and Babilla Pratella were accompanying traditional music with an orchestra and Pratella was accompanying traditional music with an orchestra of “Bruiteurs” that interrupted traditional compositions with grunts and hisses. The Bruiteurs shared the revolutionary spirit of the Dadaists, who believed that traditional cultural institutions, symbolic...
...threat of being drafted and killed in a war in which they did not support. In the case of art, the war represented the rejection of love and beauty; supporting the war would mean that one was unable to critically question the goings-on of the outside world. Avant-garde art and music literally began sleeping together. John Lennon and Fluxus artist Yoko Ono’s famous bed-in, followed by their erection of billboards in cities around the world reading “WAR IS OVER” epitomized the joint efforts of the musical and artistic communities...
While self-satirization through frenetic reproduction—as demonstrated by emergent movements at the end of the 1970s like photo-realism—remains a continual theme in the avant-garde art world, rock and roll has lost its sense of humor. The creation of MTV turned rock songs themselves into commercials, and the 1990s have seen the increasing importance of commercial success to rock and roll. At the beginning of the decade, athletes endorsed soft drinks; now that honor goes to Britney Spears. As seen by the reaction of the musical community to the current American war effort...