From the intro to Merz to Eimgre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century (by Steven Heller):

However, for cultural transformations to have lasting resonance they cannot be innocuous, no matter how damaging their influence may be in the long run, so it is important to distinguish between avant-garde and a cultural fad. Consumer society has come to accept and cheerfully anticipate the ethic known as “forced obsolescence’— the commercially motivated, periodic alteration of form and style of goods— as a means of revitalizing activity in the market-place, but this is not to be confused with avant-gardism. A true avant-garde will not overtly appeal to mass taste, and indeed encourage bad taste as a means to replace the sanctified with the unholy. An avant-garde has to produce such unpleasant alternatives to the status quo that it will be unequivocally and avidly shunned by all but those few who adhere to it. An avant-garde must make noise.

Reminiscent of Tibor Kalman’s call for bad (un)designers as the antidote to the truckloads of slick, glossy, clean, and ulitmately meaningless ‘good’ design out there. But, when bad has been co-opted to sell napkins, and grunge has become as trite as minimalism— will GOOD become the new bad? Or will avant-garde designers be forced into a cycle of trying to out-shout each other with badder and baddest design? Perhaps, as Derek Powazek suggests in this article about the trend in user-generated content, a new developing criteria for design will be authenticity— who’s making it, how are they making it, and why.