Conceptual art subverted the market system that promoted avant-garde objects

Evidence

Suddenly galleries and museums and art journals, the media, and beneficiaries of a decade of phenomenal esthetic turnover, were full of works that couldn’t be removed without being destroyed, pictures of works that no longer existed or existed in remote locations, proposals for works that did not yet or never would exist—works in short that couldn’t be bought. A system founded on the promotion and sale of avant-garde objects was being subverted, and by the avant-garde. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1601

Categorization

• SEED: The idea that a market founded on selling objects got subverted by objects that can’t be sold is a useful test case for how avant-garde movements can attack their own economic substrate.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s two-part structure of scenes becoming markets — here the avant-garde undermines the very market that supported it. — connects to: Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217