Nicholas Johnson [NJ]: Since the mid-2000s, you have been one of the most prolific and dedicated voices researching, publishing and speaking about the concept and history of the avant-garde, especially in the creative arts. For readers of this book who are hoping to think more about modernism and its relationship to the contemporary, one of the issues that many will confront is the endless circulation of different terms connected to the topic, and how to sort out the prefixes – paleo, proto, retro, neo and post – applied to all these terms. When we realised that an accessible philosophical dialogue about the avant-garde might be more useful than a survey essay, we thought that you would be the ideal person to ask: is ‘avant-garde’ still a useful term? And in what ways might its usage enrich a discussion of either ‘modernism’ or the ‘contemporary’?

Sascha Bru [SB]: I think we need to make a distinction here between different groups qualifying what counts as avant-garde: artists, critics and the market. It is obvious that in the late-capitalist market the term ‘avant-garde’ is something of a marketing tool with currency reaching well beyond the field of art or theatre: Mercedes has a line of ‘avant-garde’ cars. Software and fashion designers, advertisers – all appear prone to affix the term to their products. On the surface, this seems to mean very little, were it not for the fact that such use of the term also marks how the market today still displays a certain reverence for the liveliness, innovativeness and futurity of the avant-garde by trying to retrofit, co-opt and integrate it. This is meaningful, I would say. We know that capitalism tends to be rather selective in choosing its most enduring fetishes; that the avant-garde would still rank among these lays bare that it still comes with a surplus value that hasn't quite been exploited to the full.

To artists, the term ‘avant-garde’ has always been an ambivalent one. Few artists in the twentieth century have drawn on this label as a self-denomination.