At first sight the concept of the avant-garde seems to leave everybody feeling a little uneasy as we enter the late postmodern 1990s. Depending upon their interest, poets, composers, artists, and even critics, freely admit that the early twentieth century witnessed one or another kind of avant-garde. Some look back with affection to the political avant-gardism of Berlin writers and artists like Richard Huelsenbeck and John Heartfield. Others may revere the more aesthetic innovations of Dadaists like Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp. For others, the modernist avant-garde will appear inseparable from the conceptual ironies of Marcel Duchamp: avant-garde art will imply that which problematizes the very concept of art. Cyberpunks may in turn advocate the Futurist avant-garde tradition of high-tech insurrection and experimentation. Feminists may trace a more ideological avant-garde momentum in the writings and lifestyle of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Despite these fivefold options — the political, the aesthetic, the conceptual, the technological and the liberationist — it is repeatedly argued that the avant-garde is dead, neutralized, or somehow rendered commonplace in the present fin-de-siècle decades. Intertextual converts insist that all composition simply permutates past options, so that nothing is new, let alone avant-garde. According to the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva, dreams of high-tech progress are displaced by the realization that art merely recycles old images in the soft collisions of the trans-avant-garde. Synchronic cross-fertilization would seem to replace diachronic disruption.