Police suppressed avant-garde art regardless of the artist’s international stature

Evidence

Mekas’s strategy was to link the suppression of Flaming Creatures to the suppression of a film that similarly suggested graphic sexual acts and featured male nudity, by a celebrated European artist. The idea was to “push the prestigious Genet in their faces, pull in Sartre,” Jacobs recalled. The plan, however, was only partially successful. The cops were unaware of The Balcony or The Blacks, approaching the third year of its run. Mekas was arrested once more but as he reported from jail: “The detectives who seized [Un Chant d’Amour] did not know who Genet was. When I told them that Genet was an internationally known artist, I was told it was my fantasy.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s test case: the policing regime treated all underground culture as undifferentiated, which paradoxically bound the scene together against a common enemy — a material pressure shaping the community.