Destruction art was received as thoughtful rather than shocking in 1968

Evidence

Given the worldwide tumult the Finch show seemed like the new normal. Time did mention an Ortiz performance that involved decapitating a live chicken but, apart from the New York Times critic John Canaday (“pretentious flapdoodle”), reviews were thoughtful. Newsweek’s critic David L. Shirley felt that “Destruction artists seem to insist that art, like life, is impermanent.” Writing in The New Leader, James R. Mellow invoked the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and called the show “the simulacrum of violence.” Emily Genauer, the doyenne of New York’s daily art critics, wrote that—far from outrageous—the show was “rather touching and even naïve” and some of it “quite beautiful.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1233

Categorization

• XREF: The fact that mainstream critics found a chicken-decapitating destruction-art show ‘touching and even naïve’ is a vivid measure of how normalized radical art had become — exactly the kind of baseline the reader needs to test claims about cultural stagnation.