Dalí’s 1967 happening showed the avant-garde form already become a packaged cliché.

Evidence

Dalí had staged his own underwhelming happening at Lincoln Center in late February. Characterized by Grace Glueck as a “slickly packaged Bohemian cliché,” the event began with a screening of the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. Individual performers included an obese midget, a Parisian vedette, and the blind composer Moondog. “After slashing away with a crayon at a couple of big white cardboards, [Dalí] stepped into a huge plastic bubble,” Glueck wrote. “He flung pigment around its transparent walls and smeared them with a brush.” As the cast frugged, the artist, who had been presented with a light-bulb vest, daubed paint on a young man’s coat, then lay on the floor and contemplated his paint-smeared hands. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1948

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Evidence that the Happening form was being co-opted into slick institutional spectacle almost immediately — the gentrification-of-aesthetic-form parallel.
• XREF: Plays against the reader’s book thesis: the institutionalization of the avant-garde may predate or run parallel to the real-estate gentrification.