The subject of this issue of „Purpose” is intentionally provocative as the magazine that deals with enterprise in culture brings up the problem of avant-garde. Whereas avant-garde, by its nature, is against the purely commercial attitude to art.

Avant-garde in principle opposed the typically bourgeois values, including the commercial and consumerist way of thinking in culture. The provocative character of this issue results also from the fact that this concept does not describe the reality of art any more. Postmodernists in the 1970s announced the death of modernism as well as avant-garde. Therefore, our question is: has the deceased really raised from the dead? Perhaps however, as Habermas wants it, avant-garde, like modernism, is an uncompleted project and it has never really died? Or maybe it’s different still? Maybe in the post-modernistic, multicultural and multi-valued world avant-garde is one of many products of the contemporary culture, standing on the shelf of artistic ideas? We then ask one more question: can avant-garde be sold well?

We don’t know whether we should answer these questions affirmatively or in the negative, or maybe they cannot be answered at all? However, it seems right to raise the problem which is not obvious and remains open to new interpretations.