Rappers, influencers, and other Social Media talents tend to gain millions of followers by shocking them. Still, an equal number of people don’t understand or appreciate their avant-garde, unconventional ways. (The term “avant-garde” is from the French military and refers to a unit of soldiers that moves ahead of the main army force.)
But being avant-garde isn’t new. In the early 1900s, futurists called their artistic movement “avant-garde” in order to make it sound vaguely military because, as the Italian avant-gardist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti said in 1909, the movement was a call-to-arms against the past: “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,” wrote Marinetti in his The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. The Futurist art market is now worth an estimated $60 billion a year worldwide and, like the modern rappers and influencers, rather than shocking the public, the futurists delighted some of it.
Witness the November 2024 sale of Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan’s rendition of a banana taped to a wall, which was sold for $6.2 million. Earlier, in 1961, Piero Manzoni sold cans of his own feces. He was described in Morgan Falconer’s book How to Be Avant-Garde, published this year.
Similarly, the rap music sector generates an estimated $15 billion a year in the U.S. alone, while influencers’ annual revenues are estimated in the low billion-dollar range.
In the view of some art experts, Futurism and its Dadaism derivative, rather than destroy art, galvanized it. “Art has poisoned our life,” wrote the Dutch avant-gardist Theo van Doesburg in 1917. Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that began in Zurich in 1916. Dada artists rejected traditional art and social norms, and sought to shock and confuse audiences.
In modern terms, the Futurism movement can be compared to some rappers and Social Media influencers who gain attention by delighting their followers, mostly by shocking them.
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