Quote

An artist does not know that he is advance-guard, he must be told so or learn it from the reaction of the audience. All original composition -- classical, standard, or advance-guard -- occurs at the limits of the artist's knowledge, feelings, and technique. Being a spontaneous act, it risks, supported by what one has already grown up to, something unknown. The action of all art accepts an inner problem and concentrates on a sensuous medium. Obviously if one has an inner problem, one does not know beforehand the coming solution of it; and concentrating on the medium, one is surprised beyond oneself. Art-working is always just beyond what one can control, and the thing "does not turn out the way I planned." (In the best cases it is just beyond what one can control, and one has indeed learned to control the previous adventures up to that point, has acquired, as the ancients used to say, the habit of art that now again, in act, is in a present and therefore novel urgency.)

-- Paul Goodman, "Advance-Guard Writing in America: 1900-1950" (1951)