A schoolteacher’s anthology cover repackaged the scene’s images as marketable rebellion

Evidence

Stanley Fisher, a thirty-five-year-old Brooklyn schoolteacher, snagged an even more outrageous Snapshot photo, this one by Fred McDarrah, to plaster on the cover of his new “anthology of rebellion,” Beat Coast East. The image of Rag Man sprawled on the floor, dirty feet all but brushing the camera lens, might be easily read as a beatnik pad of indescribable, squalid degradation. (Indeed, it was read as such by the teenaged me when, some three or four years later, I saw the magazine for sale in the Paperbook Gallery on Sixth Avenue.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 137

Categorization

• SEED: The process by which a subculture’s imagery — dirt, sprawl, squalor — was instantly repackaged as a consumable ‘rebellion’ commodity directly feeds an essay on how scenes become markets.
• XREF: Directly mirrors the reader’s key idea: artists as unwitting advance guard whose degraded imagery becomes merchandise. Also resonates with the two-part structure Subcultures→Countercultures becoming a market.