Avant Pop Manifesto
I recently found a great ‘manifesto’ by Mark Amerika that puts a clear perspective on the change and activity of the music world today. It neatly lays out the idea for ‘Avant Pop’ as a movement and relates strongly to a lot of what we do as artists. I connect instantly with this:
[A]rtists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them).
It also touches on the globalized and networked nature of being a creative participant, rather than having traditional delineation of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’:
The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked Avant-Pop experience. One way to achieve this would be by creating and expanding niche communities. Niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene, will become, by virtue of the convergent electronic environments, virtual communities. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively-generated electronic publications, individually- designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi- media interactive hypertexts, conferences, etc., Avant-Pop artists and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist- author creates their beautifully-crafted, original works of art to be consumed primarily by the elitist art-world and their business- cronies who pass judgement on what is appropriate and what is not.
It’s an interesting read. You can find it here. More here.
