In the past seven years, Pinault has shown some of the most avant-garde art to be exhibited in a city known for its Renaissance beauty.

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There is precedent for major retail chains trafficking in avant-garde art.

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They ended up funding avant-garde art, and music and literature of a kind that many of their own voters would have found mystifying or even repellent.

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Yet the most provocative aspect of his vision, that avant-garde art could be a truly popular and collective experience, may be more distant than ever in the fragmentary multi-channel long-tail present.

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Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic.

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Perhaps most impressive of all, Price acquired art that avant-garde painters deemed avant-garde, even when there was little mainstream interest in it.

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The Berlin albums are perfectly poised between art and pop, containing both avant-garde enigmas like "Warszawa" and glorious, gripping songs like the title track of "Heroes, " which sounded not at all out of place, 35 years later, as Team GB's Olympic anthem.

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Young painters like Maqbool Fida Husain and Francis Newton Souza embraced avant-garde European movements like Cubism and Expressionism and advocated for a fresh take on Indian art as well.

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According to David Jackson, professor of Russian and Scandinavian art histories at the University of Leeds, these qualities allow people with little knowledge of Expressionist art to relate to what was, when it was first shown, an avant-garde work.

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