Radical 60s artworks fractured the artist’s own scene and friendships

Evidence

Schneemann was pleased to report that one spectator vomited on opening night; perhaps less so to note that the dancer Yvonne Rainer, who appeared twenty months earlier in Schneemann’s first Judson piece Newspaper Event and whom she greatly admired, departed mid-performance: “She hated Meat Joy and walked out. Messy, brainless.” Rainer was not alone. Schneemann would write to the museum administrator Jan Van der Marck that after Meat Joy “it appeared I had lost about half my friends in the art-world-scene.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 603

Categorization

• XREF: Contradiction-within-scene detail fits the reader’s testing of whether dense scenes guarantee solidarity or accelerate internal splits.