I honestly believe the partitions between genres are collapsing…read Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture but the problem is that it occurring below the ‘established’ avant-garde radar in midst of ‘popular culture’ fastest. Because the ‘elites’ have bunker mentality born of lack of exposure/finances they resist assimilation that may render them obsolete. As Groucho Marx said I would never join a club that would have me as a member…I was always prematurely mainstream…
Academia also thrives like flies on a wilderbeest on the still born corpses of failed avant-gardes.. especially if they well documented.. Hence there more M.A’s and Phd’s about Bob Cobbing than anybody else. Having been at the poetry library in early 1990’s and having met Cobbing and Co. I can only wonder at the abilty of academics to make a empty vessel hold water…meanwhile mainstream writers of substance like Willie Neill ignored until their time for revaluation. One poet”s meat another poet’s poisson?
Platforms and upgrades (pace ipad) make money not partitions between the arts. Indeed one could argue that convergence actually about shifts in thinking not content packaging. Capitalism will continue to sell you formats forever….
Film, viagra book, discount novel, tadalafil poem,musical,song are what collapsing the new generation of ‘content’ creators will not think in these terms ..maybe they the true avant garde now…
Having sat through the M.A. dissections of B.C I can see how veracity is first casualty of academia. The version created different to the reality I encountered. I have no problem with him as a poet but I do think that the minutae of his and… other fellow-travellers documentation feeds a voracious academic industry. It was as if being marginalised meant they had to document themselves ceaselessly…
I prefer Bunting’s blunt refusal to play that game ..in a letter I found at the proetry library he chastised a student who wanted to interview him for his thesis with the comment he’d rather throw his revisions into a bin than share them…ironically that didn’t prevent their exhumation 🙂
As for extinction…. I see more not less of his tribe than ever….
If by ‘heretic’ you mean ‘people who make it new’ then I’d say no we are beyond the reach of modernism as a conceptual framework and hence a heretic requires a framework or church to rebel against…I picked on B.C. because they classic modernists rebelling against the sixties state /state of play etc etc…it was a fractious and stubborn opposition.. noble but doomed. Only in academic hindsight does it gain weight.
Post modernism defined itself against the same structures i.e. modernism by its very absence and failure (so-called)..
Altermodernism is a hotchpotch of half realised themes and variations on globalisation and crumbling systems but still is not firm enough to be called completely new…again it defines against previous movements…
Fragment-modern is best term I can come up with…information overload is leading to fragmentation of all previous localised movements which is what avant-garde fed on.
Avant-garde pre 1990 fed on and through these localised cliques to support and maintain themselves..since the internet that localised foment has been curtailed and replaced with global networks which in turn dissipated localisation. For poetry read San Fran LANGUAGE and Cambridge.
So in my opinion the very idea of a ‘new’ avant-garde whatever…. is fatally flawed.
As for strong hierarchy read above….the Poetry Review clique of the 1990’s were a metropolitan white middle class clique mostly and still are. That their poetry average did not matter it became a placeholder for genuine innovation and a way forward in poetry.
‘New generation’ Poetry just like ‘New Generation’ Brit Art mopped up the attention/rewards but failed to deliver a new poetry….just a rewrite of the past…
Make it new? Why?
Maybe make it old is as avant-garde a position in Con-Dem Britain as one can achieve now?
Watching Dylan at Newport. Could one define his electric set as avant-garde…technically it pushed boundaries and broke with convention yet in hindsight it did no more than weld white folk tropes to black blues amplification….and with even more hindsight Dylan has become a repository of tradition.
Perhaps avant-garde is merely a consequence of timing and artists following their instinct. In which case any organised avant-garde always bound for failure not glory?
The Duchampian ‘moment’ has opened the floodgates for hundreds of pale imitations and weak minded artists to prosper. We are awash with imitations. Maybe what we should be striving for is ‘authenticity’……a Derridaesque nettle patch that one…but one I still feel worth grasping?