Funding shortfalls prevented a landmark underground film from being completed.

Evidence

Mekas put in a plug for a rough cut of Ken Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death, screening that weekend and looking for backers. The history of American art would have been altered if Jacobs raised the money and summoned the strength to finish his mammoth underground film. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Ties into the reader’s interest in material conditions — this is a concrete instance of financial precarity shaping which art survives.