Museum protest performance linked Rockefeller art patronage directly to napalm manufacturing

Evidence

Bloodbath is a rehearsal for GAAG’s November 18 performance, at the Museum of Modern Art. Hendricks, Johnson, Toche, and the feminist artist Silvianna Goldsmith enter MoMA at 3:00 p.m. and, after dropping a hundred leaflets in the lobby and explaining that the museum is funded by blood money (Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil having leased a plant for the purpose of manufacturing napalm), proceed to attack each other, rending clothes, bursting concealed bags of beef blood, screaming, writhing, and finally playing dead. It is a little Totentanz. All four silently rise in unison, accept applause, and split. MoMA does not press charges. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1493

Categorization

• SEED: The MoMA Blood Bath is a sharp essay hook: avant-garde performance exposing the direct line between a museum board’s corporate wealth and war crimes, the era’s clearest statement of art-infrastructure-as-blood-money.
• XREF: This ‘museum funded by blood money’ claim parallels the reader’s interest in gentrification: both are cases where the artistic avant-garde sits atop an economic infrastructure it condemns but depends on. — connects to: Northern white missionaries founded Spelman with Rockefeller money as black women’s higher education — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 177