The Motherfuckers’ trash protest prefigured Lincoln Center’s gentrification of the Lower East Side

Evidence

The mayor wanted the governor to call in the National Guard. The governor refused. With 80,000 tons of putrid waste mounting ever higher, the Motherfuckers formulated an analysis (“America turns the world into garbage”) and proposed an action of cultural exchange, transporting bags of trash from the streets of the Lower East Side up to Lincoln Center (built on the ruins of Morea’s childhood community). … It turned out to be the day the strike was settled. Nevertheless, the show went on, documented by the recently formed Newsreel group. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1163

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s thesis: the avant-garde’s gesture literally moves Lower East Side detritus to the new cultural capital’s gates — the same vector the real estate market would follow.
• SEED: Article angle: garbage as the avant-garde’s chosen material and its double meaning as both protest and prophecy of displacement.