New York’s 1968 municipal crisis formed the backdrop for its avant-garde scene

Evidence

Heading into a municipal election, New York was a mess. The past year brought soaring crime, a strike that left mountains of uncollected trash, and another strike pitting Black and Puerto Rican school boards against the heavily Jewish United Federation of Teachers. There had been the police riot at Grand Central. The student uprising at Columbia was resolved with an even more brutal crackdown. More generally, downtown theaters hosted orgies. People went naked in the streets. Acid-ripped hooligans preached disorder. The shooting of Andy Warhol was but a sideshow to the MLK and RFK assassinations, the Chicago bloodbath, and a war without end. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1368

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s goal of cataloguing material conditions — the disorder and collapse of municipal authority as one condition feeding the avant-garde’s density and extremity in this period.