Avant-garde artists in 1964 protested European high culture as imperialist.

Evidence

Originale’s opening night, September 9, the full membership of Action Against Cultural Imperialism (AACI)—composer Henry Flynt and Fluxus impresario George Maciunas—leafleted outside the West Fifty-Seventh Street concert hall, supported by several others, including Alan Marlowe, Flynt’s friend Tony Conrad, the newly arrived Japanese artist Takaho Saito, and journalist-poet Marc Schleifer, who, increasingly radical, was now associated with the Progressive Labor Party. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 556

Categorization

• XREF: The AACI protest against Stockhausen aligns with the reader’s test case: political radicalization inside the avant-garde as part of the shift from subcultures to countercultures.
• SEED: The FIGHT MUSICAL RACISM! protest against Stockhausen is a vivid example of the avant-garde turning its critical machinery on itself — possible angle on how scenes police their own boundaries.