Critics rejected antiwar art its audience embraced as communal anger, not craft

Evidence

The critic Max Kozloff, one of the organizers, characterized the Collage as a “convocation of clichés and cretinisms.” The painter Leon Golub agreed that the Collage was “gross, vulgar, clumsy, ugly!” not to mention bombastic, but, noting that hordes of visitors continuously packed the gallery, deemed it a success: “Largely anonymous even when huge signatures are scrawled across the canvas, [the piece was] a carrier of indignation harking back to street art, graffiti, burlesque, the carnival, the dance of death.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1053

Categorization

• XREF: Golub’s framing of the Collage as street-art/carnival ancestry echoes later arguments about art’s folk and communal roots — relevant to the reader’s culture-stagnation claims.
• DEFINE: The excerpt usefully frames ‘carrier of indignation’ as a category of art distinct from crafted individual expression.