Black Mask disrupted art events toward destroying bourgeois culture

Evidence

The Black Mask position was explicit by the first issue of their self-titled periodical, sold for a nickel at an NYU symposium, “What Is Art Today?” Morea’s heckling (“a shattering experience for museum directors and curators,” per the East Village Other) complemented their magazine’s blunt demand for “the complete ruination of bourgeois culture.” By way of example Black Mask disrupted a show devoted to the recently deceased, sometime Dada artist Jean Arp at a Fifty-Seventh Street gallery and ambushed poet Kenneth Koch with a mock assassination mid-reading at St. Mark’s Church. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 934

Categorization

• SEED: The mock assassination of Kenneth Koch mid-reading at St. Mark’s could seed an essay on protest as performance, art-world terrorism, and the theater of disruption.