NYC’s art world staged public self-analysis as performance spectacle.

Evidence

In another journalistic performance held on the evening of May 21, a week after Mailer met the Crazies, Jill Johnston organized a panel discussion at NYU’s Loeb Student Center about … her: “The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston.” Only Charlotte Moorman was punctual. The rest of the panel drifted on stage a half hour later in various levels of intoxication. The participants included two patrons, Walter Gutman and John de Menil, two voluble Warhol stars, Ultra Violet and Bridget Polk, plus Andy himself (who never spoke but took occasional Polaroid pictures), and two art critics, Gregory Battcock and Lil Picard. A third critic, David Bourdon, was the moderator. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1452

Categorization

• XREF: Warhol’s silent Polaroid-taking presence and the drunken panel typify the New York art-world social texture familiar from other accounts of the period.