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With chapters on Orthodox icons and Catholic cathedrals, Soviet avant-gardism and nationalist folk crafts, this book illustrates a culture whose very diversity now puts it in danger — and indeed some works pictured, such as stone statues near Kharkiv dating from the 9th to 13th century, have already been destroyed.

The expressive modern dance and melodrama of Lorde and Mitski, the elegant, subtly ferocious avant-gardism of FKA Twigs, Perfume Genius and Julia Holter — Bush’s influence abounds.

Gianvito’s formal approach is a species of leftist avant-gardism.

But as much as I am generally allergic to deliberately obscure avant-gardism, the kind that sniffs at anyone who can’t unpack the meaning of a portmanteau title composed of “sprezzatura” and “Decameron,” I found something usefully troubling, and specifically theatrical, about this commission from the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

This lush, insistent and elusive strangeness might push Williams out of the realist camp altogether, and land her in the once-overrun, now underpopulated zone of experimental fiction, the convention-smashing avant-gardism that the reticent realists of the ’80s were often seen as reacting against.