The addressee of populism is commonly defined in cultural terms as a human embodiment of a specific way of life (culture?) considered common, average or ordinary. The avant-garde art, in contrast, epitomizes precisely the opposite: the exceptional, extraordinary or aberrant. Yet at the same time, it addresses what is common in artistic creation, its objects and its audiences ("everybody is an artist", "every sound is music"). This apparent contradiction makes sense only in the mirror of language, or, more precisely, in the way both contemporary populism and contemporary art use language and deal with its historical transformations.
