Lack of institutional support and illegality fueled taboo-breaking 1960s art

Evidence

Largely free of established institutional support, drawing sustenance from urban detritus, artists produced work that was taboo-breaking and confrontational—not least regarding the established art world. A good deal of the new art could be (and was) considered anti-art. Consequently, artists often clashed with the police, the courts, the law, and authority in general. By the mid-’60s various artistic subcultures had coalesced into an entire counterculture that overlapped the struggle for civil rights, the peace and anti-war movements, Black nationalism, women’s and gay liberation, the campaign for sexual freedom and the legal assault on censorship, as well as forms of direct-action anarchy. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 13

Categorization

• SEED: The material conditions (no institutional support, urban detritus, illegality) that enabled invention are the reader’s core explanatory variables for culture-density then vs. now.
• XREF: connects to: The 1960s revolts linked workplace exploitation to cultural and creative stifling — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 438