Anti-art action-events made non-events the point of the piece

Evidence

“Nobody got admitted to the studio. Nothing happened at all,” Lil Picard approvingly reported in EVO. That was the idea. “The people went up … faced the wall, went down.” Picard linked Toche’s provocation both to “conceptual art” and a new sort of Happening: the “action-event.” These included John Perrault’s “Invisible Theater” and an upcoming panel discussion organized by fellow critic Jill Johnston, dedicated to the proposition that criticism was an outmoded form of communication. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1442

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘action-event,’ where nothing happening is itself the content — a genre distinction between happening, happening-as-nothing, and protest that matters for the scene-to-market thesis.
• SEED: The ‘criticism is an outmoded form of communication’ panel is a seed for an essay on how institutional critique in the late 60s anticipated today’s discourse about the death of criticism.
• XREF: connects to: Attending to a work can itself constitute an artistic act — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 437