Is the truth avant-garde enough?

Tonight I'm reading Steven Heller, "The Underground Mainstream," which discusses the way the avant-garde is appropriated and brought into the mainstream becoming, as he puts it, "the schlock of the novel."

As an example, Heller discusses the way the 60s psychedelic movement started with a small group of people who into sex, drugs, and anarchic behavior that threatened mainstream society. Artists found expression for the group's ideals, and these art forms were eventually popularized, watered down, and embraced by TV shows and other mainstream media. Commercial interests wanting to reach a youth market took the edge off the psychedelic art forms to make it more palatable. I love the way Heller puts it: "The avant-garde was commodified and the result was a mediocre, self-conscious rip-off. A hollow style that denoted an era remained."

Heller maintains that design outsiders eventually have to join the mainstream, if they want their work to be seen by anyone other than those in their immediate circles. Those designers, many working for advertising companies, try to pull their avant-garde ideas into the mainstream work they do.

I am sure that Heller is right when he says it's harder and harder to shock a mainstream audience with "outsider" design. I believe, however, there must still be ways it can be done. Can you reach an audience through design by being radically truthful? By telling the public the truth, either about the product you're selling or about something else that's hard for people to hear about themselves, or about our society?

Dove did something sort of like that with its "True Beauty" campaign (though it rings a little phony since they purportedly retouched photos and since Unilever, Dove's parent corporation, continued to market skin-lightening products to women in India.)

This might be a giant stretch, but I'm thinking about the Montague Bookmill, a funky little bookstore in a small town near me. Their slogan is, "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." Is it be possible to take that kind of funny, funky, self-deprecating attitude, incorporate it into design, and remain an outsider by pushing the limits of people's discomfort? Or maybe by the time you do that on any kind of a large scale, people are already immune to being pushed that way and the idea has lost its edge. Heller would probably predict that it would be so.