charles hugh smith-What’s Avant-Garde Now? Social Innovation.
What qualifies as true avant-garde? Degrowth qualifies–and very little else.
In the 20th century, avant-garde was a term primarily reserved for the arts: fine arts, music, performance and literature. Avant garde–literally fore-guard or vanguard— challenges the conventions of Status Quo measures of beauty and departs from traditional forms and conceptions of value.
In many cases, the departure is designed to shock traditionalists by flaunting accepted norms; by traditional standards, avant-garde art is ugly or disturbing, avant-garde music is atonal and unmelodic, avant-garde theatre flouts conventional narrative structure and avant-garde social movements upend traditional morals and values.
Virtually all design and art fields have been continually disrupted by avant-garde movements, to the point that the conventional consumerist economy now depends on avant-garde (or perhaps quasi-avant-garde) to create “the new” that can be sold at a profit to differentiate the in-crowd from those (sigh–how sad) left behind.
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