The event that got away and how to catch it (researching ephemeral art)

Abstract

As the underpinnings of High Modernism were everywhere being called into question in the 1950s and 1960s, the art world endeavoured to reinvent itself in new ways. For example, the view that meaning in art need not be embodied in static, timeless objects of supposedly universal significance was challenged by the idea of art as time-based, context-specific, or ephemeral. For artists, these changes offered a way to reformulate the art world system in accordance with their vision of what mattered, and thus to diminish the authority of big museums, commercial galleries, and glossy trade magazines, whose main function seemed to be the promotion of art not as a mode of critical inquiry, but as a luxury product for ‘Establishment’ elites.