Canonical exclusion inside the avant-garde turned on who did the fabrication

Evidence

Reviewing Primary Structures in Arts Magazine, the twenty-six-year-old artist Mel Bochner recognized a new attitude that consigned the Park Place Group, among other sculptors, to a purgatory inhabited by “art-mystics,” “art-existentialists,” “space-arts,” and retro-futurist artists merely “manipulating streamlined versions of outmoded forms.” All were to be dismissed in any discussion of the New Art. Judd and the other high-minded hardcore reductivists (Andre, Flavin, LeWitt, and Morris) programmatically effaced content and, as much of their work was fabricated, the hand of the artist. Despite a kindred hard-edged minimalist style, Park Place was hooked on old-fashioned expressive art. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1022

Categorization

• XREF: Precursor to later chapters’ scene-as-market argument: the ‘new attitude’ Bochner names is precedent for how a scene anoints itself and exiles rivals, which the reader will test against cultural-stagnation claims.