Underground press positioned museums as market manipulators for collectors

Evidence

The happening would be reported in both EVO and Rat, which included a sidebar by Boris Lurie explaining that MoMA’s true function is “the manipulation and promotion of market-place art … for the benefit of collectors-investors and dealers.” A month later the Times will run an article headlined MUSEUMS SEEKING GUARDS TO STEM MOUNTING CRIME. A few weeks after that, twenty members of the AWC stage a “lie-in” in front of Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art, demanding a meeting with the museum’s board of trustees. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1494

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s gentrification-origin thesis: the underground’s critique framed art institutions as market-serving, the same institutional apparatus artists both used and were displaced through.
• SHARE: The guerilla-art-history angle (lie-in before Guernica) is niche enough to send to someone interested in art activism.