The history of the avant-garde; as seen by a worn out, brain dead senior art troll.

Basically, the early modernists/impressionists looked at the salon and went FUCK YOU WE'RE GONNA DO WHAT WE WANT.

And for a while, everyone went with it. The cubists and fauves eventually formed their own special clubs, and everyone looked at it and went "HEY THATS COOL CAN WE JOIN?!" And they said "LOL NO" so the expressionists and futurists made their own special clubs that were similar BUT DIFFERENT from the cubists.

Then WW1 happened and everyone was like "OH SHIT". Cubism, futurism, and expressionism fell out of favor cause they were considered elitist and their intellectual optimism didn't fit with how much the world sucked. Many artists went back to realism, cause well, the world sucked so abstraction and intellectualism was no longer fun.

 The dadaists came forward with a "Everything sucks and nothing makes sense, so our art isn't going to make sense and we're going to point out the fact that the world sucks." They also laughedd at the elitism of ART, and loved mass production, and tried to blur the lines between art and machinery. Everything was art as long as you said it was, ALA Duchamp's ready mades.

 This gave the ability to De stijl, Bauhaus, and the Constructivists to shout "DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE IS ART TOO GUIS!" and they started mass producing art, and using their artistic skills to design every day objects that were useful. They wanted to bring art and good design to the EVERYMAN.

Surrealism also grew out of Dada, which embraced weirdness for the sake of weird, and trying to bring art back to some basic, subconscious world. They like sex and thought Freud was a cool guy.

Then the Nazis (and Commies) came and chased them all out to America or killed them cause they were a weird bunch of freaks anyways.

THE END

Epilogue: In AMURIKAFUCKYEAH they all invented a NEW INTERNATIONAL STYLE YO and made lots of money that they cried themselves to sleep on cause they were so misunderstood.

Epilogue II: The Americans they taught to be weird freaks were used by the CIA to defeat the RED BASTARD COMMIES and bring INDIVIDUALITY back to Europe.

Epilogue III- Feminism rejects the PHALLUS and celebrates the VAGINA that gave birth to POST MODERNISM. Pie was served by Ms. Chicago.

Epilogue IIII- Post modernism looks at this shit, calls modernists a bunch of FUCKING PROGRESSIVE OPTIMISTS who succeeded at NOTHING, and turns art into irony and cynicism. They declare Duchamp a god and TROLL ON.