Word: avante
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...heartfelt if muddled historical melodrama, and the last was a conventional two-character problem drama about a marriage. Although the scripts varied in diction and temperament, fully half were in essence realistic, and all but two were set in current or recent America. None could be categorized as truly avant-garde. This artistically conservative nature may reflect a rediscovery by playwrights of the values of traditional narrative theater, or it may indicate Actors Theater's eagerness to maintain a high mainstream profile...
...Moore hopes to work for a theater that is both popular and able to convey a message. "I don't like meaningless Broadway entertainment, but I also don't like to go and set there and feel stupid, trying to figure out the director's meaning." Moore thinks that avant-garde theater is becoming too elitist and inaccessible, and terms it "pretentious...
Like many sweet old buffers, he admired authority. He painted the artists lining up for the Salon des Independants as an army of black-clad troops, carrying paintings of identical size; it was a parody of the military metaphor of the avant-garde. Rousseau wanted honors, like his heroes. When the French government sent him a decoration by mistake he would not send it back, and obstinately wore its violet rosette for the rest of his life. It was the Palmes Academiques--a serendipitous fluke, in view of his obsession with exotic scenes of distant jungles...
...common people with dirty feet and ragged sleeves. There is also a homosexual Caravaggio, moved into the spotlight during the '70s by gay liberation: the painter of overripe, peachy bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream. Most of all, there is Caravaggio the avant-gardist...
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius, which identifies Caravaggio as the first avant-garde artist. Our time, with its craving for rapid and unnerving change in the look of art, was bound to love Caravaggio. He was called an evil genius, an anti-Michelangelo; his work was compared to an overpeppered stew, and it became a favorite pretext for centrist finger wagging in the 17th century...