What makes avant-garde avant-garde?

[Vincent A. Maeder]

What is it that makes avant-garde writing avant-garde?  Perhaps this
question should be answered in terms of art or music.  It seems that we
all have different bases for what makes one piece, one
author/artist/musician, avant-garde while another is not.  For example,
was Zadie Smith avant-garde when she published White Teeth?  If the
answer is yes, then what about it was avant-garde?  That she was a new
author with her own style?  What about the fact that she merely
followed, as Mr. Wood states, the formulaic "hysterical realism" (to
which Ms. Smith has pled guilty)?  
 
Must the artist take the medium toward a new expression in order to be
avant-garde?  If so, how revolutionary (or evolutionary) must the new
expression be?
 
And at what point does that new expression lose its currency as a
vanguard of the art form? (Perhaps when it is adopted and marketed by
the big companies? Or when it appears in the echoes of Starbucks
coffeehouses? Speaking of Starbucks, if a manuscript is written at a
Starbucks-thinking of all those posturing authors just sopping up all
that creativity from Starbucks' soundtracks-is it possible it could ever
be avant-garde?  Me, I'm going to a small Mexican village to seek out
that elusive character inherent in all foreign born material. this,
despite that presumptuous e-mail suffix I suffer with.)
 
Then there is the whole issue of avant-garde versus those who merely
remain "with it" (as in John Updike-all due respect to our Malingd
friend).
 
 
Vincent A. Maeder
vmaeder at cyhc-law.com
 
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