Word: gardism
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...Cubism--a splendidly witty reference to the dilemma American artists found themselves in when they looked across the Atlantic to Paris. How could you get out of the colonial bind--the sense of being condemned, in the name of avant-garde aspiration, to imitate the outer forms of avant-gardism, to keep doing the new at second hand? This was the problem for South American modernists too--and in spades. The whole relation of South American art to Europe and then, after 1950 or so, to North America, was thorny and merciless to the "provincials...
...Lorenzo Wainscott Pagano: And we cannot ignore our roots in the electronic avant-gardism of 1950s Paris. These synthesizers may be used in pop music, but their roots are in high academia. And we don't forget that...
...year is as uneven as it was under the Menotti regime -- ranging from the spectacular (Irish actor Barry McGovern in I'll Go On, a mordant one-man show derived from three novels by Samuel Beckett) to the mediocre (Hans Werner Henze's tired exercise in late-'50s avant-gardism, Der Prinz von Homburg) to the risible (the washed-up soprano Renata Scotto singing the role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier). Still, Spoleto seems on course to become one of the nation's most important and enjoyable arts events...
...that the very idea of avant-gardism was fraying into exhaustion and deconstructionist footnotes, why shouldn't an artist try to be, as Kitaj put it, "an illustrator of life"? Can an art that isn't based at least in some degree on "the human clay" satisfy us for long? And what could such an art be worth without a return to formal drawing, in all its physicality and gravity...
...yeah. I do see myself as an American author, but I think that we often have a very narrow notion of what American writing is. I think that what's happening right now in American literature is a kind of avant-gardism of content...People are less interested in experimenting with form and are more interested in dragging into the novel all kinds of new content, including talking about ethnic groups that have never been represented before. And to the degree that everyone seems to have decided that homosexuals will be treated as though they were an ethnic group...