Today I did not attend class because I was feeling sick, however I did do the reading so I will make this post about that.
I want to talk about the notion of Avant-Guarde. I think it is interesting that instead of referring to a particular movement (which is how most people tend to interpret it in my experience) it is a term that emerges almost through the necessity of describing how art movements operated in the late 19th Century moving forward. While reading about it, and about the revolutionary implication of Avant-Guarde, it occurred to me that this too, was a complete turning point in the way art was produced. As we know, before Neo-Classicism we spoke of art periods, widely scholastic and in their own way, pretty homogenous. It has always been so that a new period begins through a departure from the previous, but Avant-Guarde is something else, provocative is part of the definition. It is an intentional, instead of a gradual step forward.
My favorite example of this is of course, Duchamp. So ahead of his time that he is still a controversial topic of discussion. With my knowledge of post-modernism, I think I can say that the introduction of conceptual art would be crucial to the unraveling of art in the 20th and 21st Century.