Pop Culture References of Wizard101: Novus / Wallaru – Avant Guard

Avant Guard – Avant-garde
https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Avant_Guard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-garde

Avant Guard is the self proclaimed non-de-plume of the artist/curator of the Readymade Gallery. She is the self-styled protector of peace and the old ways, the enemy of the New Pingouinonia, its greed and so-called sense. She wants to forget sense, forget logic, forget words and their meanings, “Let Pineapple be the call of our march and Poetry our hats.”

Your wizard will experience battle in its most rarefied form, without glitz and style and fancy design. Your “Magical Combat” is actually her art, created from a dream she had. The showings are daily except when the Moon is visible and the Sun is sad. You will fight in her Readymade Gallery, the Theater of the Absurd, and the Hall of Purposeful Abstraction.

Eventually, your wizard meets up with Avant Guard in Wallaru. She is working with Uwe Boll and the Scriptkeeper on “The Fourth Lark”, a play about your wizard and the political scene of the Spiral.

In the arts and literature, the term avant-garde (from French meaning ‘advance guard’ or ‘vanguard’) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.

As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay “The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist” (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues’s political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to “serve as [the] avant-garde” of the people, because “the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way” to realize social, political, and economic reforms.

In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms, such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in the early 20th centuries. In art history the socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s).

The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified Left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. In the mid-19th century, as a cultural term, avant-garde identified a genre of art that advocated art-as-politics, art as an aesthetic and political means for realizing social change in a society. Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge the cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society.

The current list of all the (known) Novus references are located here.
The current list of all the (known) Wallaru references can be found here.

Although I am well versed in Pop Culture references but I do not claim to have caught them all. Let me know your favorites in the comments and if I’ve missed one you caught, let me know so I can add it to the list.

Text for this article is excerpted from the linked wiki pages

Avant Guard image is from Wizard101, and is copyright of KingsIsle Entertainment.

The Love of Zero and The Overthrow of the Autocracy images are borrowed from Wikipedia. Both are in the Public Domain

Image usage qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.