Avant-garde is French for bullshit
Interpretation
This quote critiques the pretentiousness often associated with avant-garde art movements.
John Lennonβs quote highlights a skepticism towards the avant-garde art movement, suggesting that it sometimes veers into the realm of pretentiousness or inaccessibility. By using the term 'bullshit', Lennon emphasizes the idea that some art labeled as avant-garde may lack genuine value or meaning, provoking a reconsideration of what is truly artistic versus what is simply performative or obscure.
In practice
During a discussion on modern art, one could use this quote to highlight the divide between meaningful and pretentious artistic expressions.
When I get older losing my hair many years from now. Will you still be sending me a Valentine. Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? If I'd been out till quarter to three would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?
The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.
I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.
Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something.
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.
I've been baking bread and looking after the baby...Everyone else who has asked me that question over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I made the loaves [of bread,] I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus, don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?
The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.
Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
Then came a moment of renaissance,_x000D_ _x000D_ I looked up - you again are there,_x000D_ _x000D_ A fleeting vision, the quintessence_x000D_ _x000D_ Of all that`s beautiful and rare.
When I'm making stuff, the thing that excites me most is not the result, but the process and trying to do something I've never done before.
Unlike some of my peers, I haven't really hit a writer's block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick.
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