Only forty people ever attended an epochal nineteen-hour avant-garde performance

Evidence

The Pocket Theater had a capacity of 197. Attendance peaked at forty, just after midnight on Monday, following the opening of Hans Hofmann’s MoMA retrospective. “The atmosphere is dreamlike and hypnotic, à la Last Year at Marienbad,” one member of the Times’s relay team reported, citing the paradox of being simultaneously irritated and hypnotized by the music. By 2:00 a.m. there were half as many, “mostly male and unmistakably of the beatnik variety.” The performance ended promptly at 12:40 Tuesday afternoon with one yell of “encore,” possibly from Karl Schenzer, who identified himself as an actor appearing in The Brig and was the only member of the audience present for the entire performance. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 486

Categorization

• XREF: Counterintuitive data point for the reader’s stagnation thesis: a canonized avant-garde landmark had a tiny actual audience — density of invention didn’t require mass attendance.
• SEED: Article angle: the gap between mythic avant-garde events and their minuscule live audiences, and why posterity inflates them.