Word: avant
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...Kline's random slashings and Jackson Pollock's random drippings ran another gauntlet of disbelief before being established as art. And as the seventies' Goths buck before art ordered by telephone and manufactured in factories, before pictures of chalked-off earth sites and rocks wrapped in plastic, yet another avant garde rises to vindicate them. But it is an awfully shaky testimony they give. No, what is new is not skepticism among the non-intellectuals. What is new is the absence of skepticism in the place it has always flourished best, the Cultural Establishment. The conservatism that once took...
These New Conservatives--ironically they are also known as the avant garde--cling for security in their belief to the example of Dada. But the kinship claimed is true only at its most superficial. Dada was maligned in its own time only to be later recognized as a serious struggling to escape exhausted convention and revitalize the relevance of art. Now, of course, it is quite respectably ensconced in the annals of art history, its profound commitment to art and its future gratefully acknowledged. But the homage paid to Dada by the New Conservatives has ignored its crucial legacy...
...river's muddy banks. But their message has a decidedly new twist. Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Otrabanda Theatre Company-four actors, one actress, a crew-woman and, until recently, a dog named Sweenie-this summer is bringing frenetic, sometimes avant-garde drama to 30 Mississippi River communities from St. Louis to New Orleans...
...crux of Kristol's argument is that America is experiencing a crisis of values in an unprecedented way. There has always been a questioning of basic values in Western society, but this phenomenon was always restricted to what Lionel Trilling calls the "adversary culture," the avant-garde elite. The friction between the elitist culture and the bourgeois society it lived in produced some of Western culture's very greatest art; but so long as the conflict was restricted to an elite, the social consequences were minimal. But it is only relatively recently that this adversary culture has taken over...
...Trumpet (Gerard Schwarz, trumpet, Ursula Oppens, piano, play Peter Maxwell Davies' Sonata for Trumpet and Piano, Lucia Dlugozewski's Space Is a Diamond, and William Hellerman's Passages 13-The Fire, Nonesuch; $2.98). All too often avant-garde music looms as a forbidding wilderness of inhospitable sounds. Not this album of contemporary trumpet music performed by versatile Trumpeter Schwarz. The Sonata by Davies, who also composed the opera Taverner, is sequential but melodic. Composer Dlugozewski, who studied with Varese, employs a variety of mutes and experimental techniques without sacrificing emotional content. Composer Hellerman, a Columbia University faculty...