Media coverage made Kusama’s early Happenings real rather than incidental

Evidence

And that was the point. Some thirty representatives of the media waited around for another hour but … the fleshy blonde was it. According to Wetzsteon, Time’s reporter asked him (“more indignant than curious”) if this was what’s happening in New York? Wetzsteon, however, understood Kusama’s gambit, anticipating her subsequent desire, expressed in a 1969 interview with a Japanese weekly, to “perform Happening exclusively for press.” Self-Obliteration was a piece that only really existed when acknowledged by TV. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1176

Categorization

• SEED: Kusama’s ‘perform Happening exclusively for press’ as a case study of the feedback loop between avant-garde art and media coverage — an angle for explaining cultural production’s media dependency.
• XREF: Connects to the broader claim being tested from this shelf about why culture stagnates now — here is a golden age where the avant-garde actively demanded press mediation rather than despising it.