Today’s lesson: If everybody is avant-garde, nobody is

Mark Greif, a founder and editor of the fantastic cultural magazine n+1, talking on the phone earlier today:

When n+1 was new, people would come and say: “Oh you guys, you want to be an avant-garde magazine.” And we would have to say: “No, no, no, we’re not avant-garde.” And they would not understand this, they’d be like: “What do you mean? Doesn’t everyone wanna be avant-garde?”

A longer transcript of our conversation is bound to appear in the upcoming issue of Spex.