Avant-garde  in French means front guard, advance guard, or vanguard. People often use the term in French and English to refer to people or works that are experimental or novel, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics.

According to its champions, the avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm within definitions of art/culture/reality.

The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled soldiers, explores the terrain ahead of a large advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow. This concept is applied to the work done by small bands of intellectuals and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for society to follow. Due to implied meanings stemming from the military terminology, some people feel the avant-garde implies elitism, especially when used to describe cultural movements.

Thus avant-garde in music may refer to an extreme form of musical improvisation in which little or no regard is given by soloists to any underlying chord structure or rhythm.

The term may also refer to the promotion of radical social reforms, the aims of its various movements presented in public declarations called manifestos. Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with art for art's sake, focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than with wider social reform.

The origin of the application of this French term to art can be fixed at May 17, 1863, the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris, organised by painters whose work was rejected for the annual Paris Salon of officially sanctioned academic art. Salons des Refusés were held in 1874, 1875, and 1886.

By some assessments, avant-garde art includes street art, for example graffiti and any other movement which pushes forward the accepted boundaries.

For instance: Where Marcel Duchamp's urinal may have been avant-garde at the time, today if someone created it again it would not be avant-garde because it has already been done. Avant-garde is therefore temporal and relates to the process of art's unfolding in time. It can be applied to the forerunners of any new movements. However, Duchamp and his work, remain avant-garde because he pushed art forward.