Avant-garde means 'in front of the garde'. It means, that you show the way to which the rest of the people will follow. So dankrsta, saying: What Cage was doing will always be avant-garde whether you compare it to what was happening before him or after him is kinda oxymoronic (I don't know the less pretentious term... English is not my first language...). If he is always considered in front, it's because no one has followed him, and therefore he wasn't in front to begin with, but off to his own side... Being avant-garde means that you transform your own tradition, point out the way of the future. And yes, John Cage is probably one of the best examples of a classical avantgardist - perhaps only Schoenberg compares - but he is still a classical avantgardist. Moving him away from classical is senseless, and betrays a misunderstanding of what the term even means. IMHO.
And Skaligojurah, I mentioned Battles, because Battles is also in the avant-garde forum. To be honest, it's the fact that there even is an avant-garde / experimental subsection that is a bit ridiculous, because there is always experiments and people in front of others in each and every subgenre. I think The-Dream experiments a lot, but I wouldn't move him away from the R'n'B-subsection. I see the point of having stuff like the album club - actually I think that is a great idea - but removing stuff from their proper context and into this silly place is... silly.
BTW: You can't speak of avant-garde without speaking about politics. Judging whether stuff is avant solely on their musical contents is truly betraying the spirit of avant. IMHO.
Now, about Kraut. I think most of it would have surfaced without him. A lot of it was a response to a historical situation in Germany, which also made an explosion in the art of cinema. And, you know, explosions in the literal sense, with terorist groups running around. A lot of it was trying to create new ways of doing things, as a response to a world which a lot of people thought of as morally bankrupts - the Germany of their parents generation, who had never really satisfyingly settled the score with the horific deeds of the past. So the music would probably have been quite different without Cage and Stockhousen, and James Brown, and Reich, etc, etc - but I think something or other would have happened.
But Cage is really, really important. If you read French Philosophy from the sixties and seventies, they too quote Cage all the time. He was an avant-garde genius. But in the realm of the clasical.
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Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur + thoughts on women in Akhmatova and Mizuguchi: The Centrifugue
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