Avant garde? Avant merde, more like.
There's a worrying trend at the moment - to give everything a twist. Traditionalist and purist are seen as old-fashioned and behind the times. But do we really need bars that sell cereal, zany menus and funny cat pictures or is this just another way of justifying a lack of talent and ideas.
It used to be that avant garde would make true artists and intellectuals recoil in disgust at this pseudo... whatever it is. It was just a fancy term for whacky. A band of incredibly untalented, pretentious toffs would declare Proust's In Search of Lost Time needed to be acted out with goats to represent the dumbed-down effects of being purposeless - little did they know this was a reflection of how the world sees them.
The movement had a very important place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These pioneers were challenging how we see the world by breaking the status quo - not by adapting what was already in existence, but creating something completely new. Without the avant garde movement we wouldn't have expressionism, cubism and pop art. It was high-brow punk. Rebellious, offensive and innovative. I don't recall Mondrian turning Gainsborough's paintings into a grid of coloured blocks, Salvador Dali didn't remake The Great Dictator using melting clocks and Marcel Duchamp didn't interpret Hamlet using a urinal.
Since the rise of the hipster, avant garde has become mainstream and therefore, acceptable. Products have punny names, artwork is rough, language is crass and concepts are only understood by space cadets. Before the hipster, it was all frustrated post-punk art students-cum-marketing execs who filled our screens and pages with head-scratching adverts. Remember this one?
Gone are the days of prose. Gone are the days of smart ideas. Gone are the days of intelligent execution. We now have to live through all the noise of packaging trying to be funny, models dressed in unfathomable clothing while standing in vicarious positions and, the biggest crimes of all, the bastardisation of some of the most beautiful pieces of writing, movie, art and dance.
I understand the importance of making things accessible to the masses and perhaps avant garde does that to an extent as it should strip away elitism and pomp, but what it does is turn a clique into an equally impenetrable laughing stock.
My aversion to avant garde is it thinks people are stupid - it obnoxiously assumes I need it to do my thinking for me through interpretive dance. How can my simple, state-school brain understand the Nutcracker Suite as Tschakovsky intended it? What's a child of immigrants meant to make of Mozart's Don Giovanni performed by the London Philharmonic? Can a person with a 9-5 job watch Maria Callas perform Puccini's Madame Butterfly without being baffled? And can a girl who didn't go Oxbridge understand the intricacies and subtext of an unabridged version of Sophocles' Antigone?
The answer is yes. I have the gift of sight, so I can watch actors act. I have the privilege of literacy so I can process words. And I possess the power of hearing, so I can listen to speech and notes. Don't use your bullshit 'art' to patronise me and cover up the fact that you're a delusional twat who can't act, sing, paint, write or recite words. Oh and your production are low-brow and utter merde.
First published 05/08/2015
It used to be that avant garde would make true artists and intellectuals recoil in disgust at this pseudo... whatever it is. It was just a fancy term for whacky. A band of incredibly untalented, pretentious toffs would declare Proust's In Search of Lost Time needed to be acted out with goats to represent the dumbed-down effects of being purposeless - little did they know this was a reflection of how the world sees them.
The movement had a very important place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These pioneers were challenging how we see the world by breaking the status quo - not by adapting what was already in existence, but creating something completely new. Without the avant garde movement we wouldn't have expressionism, cubism and pop art. It was high-brow punk. Rebellious, offensive and innovative. I don't recall Mondrian turning Gainsborough's paintings into a grid of coloured blocks, Salvador Dali didn't remake The Great Dictator using melting clocks and Marcel Duchamp didn't interpret Hamlet using a urinal.
Since the rise of the hipster, avant garde has become mainstream and therefore, acceptable. Products have punny names, artwork is rough, language is crass and concepts are only understood by space cadets. Before the hipster, it was all frustrated post-punk art students-cum-marketing execs who filled our screens and pages with head-scratching adverts. Remember this one?
Gone are the days of prose. Gone are the days of smart ideas. Gone are the days of intelligent execution. We now have to live through all the noise of packaging trying to be funny, models dressed in unfathomable clothing while standing in vicarious positions and, the biggest crimes of all, the bastardisation of some of the most beautiful pieces of writing, movie, art and dance.
I understand the importance of making things accessible to the masses and perhaps avant garde does that to an extent as it should strip away elitism and pomp, but what it does is turn a clique into an equally impenetrable laughing stock.
My aversion to avant garde is it thinks people are stupid - it obnoxiously assumes I need it to do my thinking for me through interpretive dance. How can my simple, state-school brain understand the Nutcracker Suite as Tschakovsky intended it? What's a child of immigrants meant to make of Mozart's Don Giovanni performed by the London Philharmonic? Can a person with a 9-5 job watch Maria Callas perform Puccini's Madame Butterfly without being baffled? And can a girl who didn't go Oxbridge understand the intricacies and subtext of an unabridged version of Sophocles' Antigone?
The answer is yes. I have the gift of sight, so I can watch actors act. I have the privilege of literacy so I can process words. And I possess the power of hearing, so I can listen to speech and notes. Don't use your bullshit 'art' to patronise me and cover up the fact that you're a delusional twat who can't act, sing, paint, write or recite words. Oh and your production are low-brow and utter merde.
First published 05/08/2015
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