An art performance could be experienced as the funeral of capitalist civilization

Evidence

The sound of the scratchy 78 recording Mekas identified as the “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Strauss’s Salome, played at a lugubrious 33 RPM, invoked a mood: “I suddenly was very conscious that it was 2:00 a.m. in New York, and very late, and most of the city was sleeping, even on Saturday night.” Smith’s play struck him as “the final burial rites of the capitalist civilization.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1616

Categorization

• XREF: This 1971 elegy-for-capitalism framing is a reference point against shelf claims that culture stagnates now — the sense of ending was already fully present fifty years earlier.