When I think about the avant-garde, I think about artists making art for other artists. If you make a painting that’s just a bunch of colored squares or splashes of paint on a canvas, an average person might not be able to tell your art from the efforts of a small child. But other artists will know that you’re trying to subvert the paradigm they’ve been working in — to make a statement about what art is. That’s the kind of thing that only one’s artistic peers understand.

Some artists will always want to make things for other artists to see and react to and judge. But I think that in the old days, many did it out of technological necessity.

Discovering good artists in the old days was a very difficult endeavor. Production companies and publishers had to spend a lot of effort scouting around, and then make a guess as to how a creator’s work would perform in the commercial sphere. An easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff was to basically use a peer review system — to use a creator’s standing in the artistic community as a proxy for whether they would sell to a more general audience.

Noah Smith, Why has American pop culture stagnated?, Noahpinion, May 14, 2025