Institutional commission of Tinguely coincided with and amplified mainstream press coverage of happenings

Evidence

Tinguely assembled his monstrous jerry-built gadget, twenty feet high and thirty feet long, in one of the Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes then exhibited in the MoMA sculpture garden, using discarded bicycles and baby carriages and junk found on Canal Street. Set in shuddering motion, the machine created its own smoke screen. The audience, which included New York’s governor (a MoMA trustee), booed when a fireman felt compelled to use a heavy CO2 fire extinguisher to smother the flaming piano, and cheered as the machine shook, gyrated, and ultimately collapsed into rubble. Yet even as Tinguely was setting up his contraption, Time ran a story on Ray Gun. Happenings had gone national. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis about avant-gardes being produced by conditions — the market attention arrived via an institution, not the subculture itself.