Avant-garde events explicitly rejected entertainment as their purpose

Evidence

Together, Young and Ono organized a six-month series of two-evening concerts at Ono’s loft—a grimy, low-ceiling space with a $50 monthly rent on the top floor of 112 Chambers Street. The loft had no heat. Electricity was furnished from the space below via extension cord. Ono somehow managed to maneuver a piano into the space but Young cautioned the prospective attendees on his mailing list to “come prepared to sit on the floor.” The notice also included the capitalized warning that THE PURPOSE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT (not a caveat one was likely to find at a performance of Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Spex). — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 187

Categorization

• DEFINE: The not-entertainment warning defines the avant-garde attitude as oppositional to entertainment — a key distinction the reader can deploy against the ‘culture stagnates because it’s all entertainment’ thesis.
• XREF: connects to: The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 319