Museums pivoted from collecting objects to staging artist experiences in 1969-70.

Evidence

“A museum traditionally houses and conserves objects of art but now it becomes responsible for the execution of the artist’s idea,” the Museum of Modern Art announced. December 30, MoMA opened an exhibition called Spaces in which spectators changed their shoes for paper slippers to “participate” (albeit minimally) in a series of artist-designed site-specific environments, one more pivot from the collectible art object to the art “experience”—gallery as ashram. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1528

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s thesis about how the market absorbed the avant-garde — the institutional pivot from object to experience is the mechanism by which art became a lifestyle commodity.
• SEED: The ‘gallery as ashram’ pivot is a clean frame for an essay on how art institutions absorbed the counterculture by monetizing participation rather than objects.