Avant-garde

[3] As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art.

[4] In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms, such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in the early 20th centuries.

[6] The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army.

Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge the cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society.

[17] Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu, in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987),[18] and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995),[19] said that Western culture entered a post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy.

"[21][22] Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to arrière-garde, which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard.

[24] The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic.

"[35] The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Miles Davis.