Stirling Newberry to Bill Pirkle: >The best way to think of an avant-garde is one which is self-consciously >aware of attempting to create difference. Hence when Wagner declares that >only the artist of the future can experience the life of the future, he is >being an avant-gardist in his own time. The example is right, but something lacks to the definition. Avant-garde implies a full ideological structure lying beneath this attempt of creating difference: the self-consciousness (almost paranoia) comes precisely from that. For a full ideological structure I mean a theory about how does *every* aspect of the world should be. An avant-gardist is always giving explanations about his work. In his language, an explanation is equal to a prophecy, because he has also a theory about History. In fact, avant-garde could be defined as a particular state of mind in which the patient knows (or believes to know) his own place in History and consequently struggle for it. Pablo Massa [log in to unmask]