Avant-garde form compels even critical content to endorse the counterculture.

Evidence

Brecht, who, unlike Eliscu, was not put off by the show’s politics, summed it up: “One is tempted to call [Dionysus] anti-hip. However, by the form of the theatrical event, [Schechner] seems existentially committed to the hip, a hippie & engaged in converting the spectators to it.” The medium was the message. The show could not but be fashionably “pro-hip.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1247

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s core thesis about artists as unwitting advance guard of gentrification: whatever the artists intend, the medium of the avant-garde scene itself converts audiences and draws real estate. — connects to: The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 319