The death of Fluxus was the death of art: a perspective on the decadence of contemporary art

The world of art today is full of things that are silly, trivial, random, easy to do. An artist wanders round a gallery wearing an animal suit (Mark Wallinger). Richard Long walked through Scottish countryside, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art bought his snapshots. Michael Landy destroyed everything he owned (not easy psychologically, but not exactly requiring skill). Banksy stencils images onto the walls of buildings and people try and steal or sell the wall. Duchamp defaced postcards but the Chapman brothers defaced very expensive Goya etchings (earlier Robert Rauchenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, but he told de Kooning about it). More complex artworks are typically produced by the artist creating a list of instructions and passing them on to a fabricator. And yet the artist claims the product as something original to be sold for huge amounts of money.

Although this style of art, requiring minimal effort, goes back to the early 20th century, in the beginning it was the creation of skilled artist-theorist-provocateurs who had already established a reputation in other areas (e.g. Duchamp and Malevich begun as more conventional painters), and it did not become a mainstream activity until the early 1960s. The first art movement to really specialise in it was Fluxus, which had roots in the late 50s avant-garde music scene but flourished in the 60s.

Fluxus composers produced musical pieces involving one note, or silence, or the smashing of a violin, or nothing but the composer and orchestra wrapping baton and instruments in brown paper. They extended this to produce scores that could be applied in other areas of life. Ken Friedman instructed "Play baseball with a fruit" or "Someone sneezes. A year later, send a postcard reading, 'Gesundheit!'" Yoko Ono suggested, "Hit a wall with your head." Larry Miller said, "Chew a nice piece of notebook or drawing paper".

Many of these things would be unexceptional if done by a modern artist, perhaps on a film which they would be commissioned to produce or would sell to a gallery. But the key for Fluxus (and for related phenomena like Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra) was not to create art works that had value and could be exhibited in themselves, but the opposite. They wanted to provide an artistic democracy, things that everyone could do, and which therefore could not be sold or exhibited, because why would you pay to buy or go to see something you could make or do yourself?

A Fluxus manifesto explained the contrast:

ART

To justify artist's professional, parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist's indispensability and exclusiveness, He must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him, He must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art.

Therefore, art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skillfull, significant, theatrical.

It must appear to be valuable as commodity so as to provide the artist with an income.

To raise its value (artist's income and patron's profit), art is made to appear rare, limited in quantity and therefore obtainable and accessible only to the social elite and institutions.

FLUXUS ART-AMUSEMENT

To establish artist's non-professional status in society, he must demonstarte artist's dispensability and inclusiveness, he must demonstrate the selfsufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can be art and anyone can do it.

Therefore, art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.

The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.

Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretention or urge to participate in the competition of "one-upmanship" with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of a simple natural event, a game or gag. It is the fusion of Spike Jones, Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp.

Fluxus was intended to be art that would not be part of the art world (today you can pay a fair bit of money for one of their nice little boxes, but nothing like a Banksy.)

One of Mieko Shiomi's scores did say:

Air Event
Inflate a small rubber balloon in one deep breath and sign your name on the surface of the balloon.
(this is your lung)
You can buy the lungs of other performers at an auction.

But it is unclear what prices were paid, if ever an auction occurred. The main criticism of Fluxus is that often one doubts that the actions were ever performed.

Despite the democratic ideals, Fluxus members went on to become stars. John Cage became an acclaimed composer and his works works became increasingly conventional. Joseph Beuys was a charismatic public speaker with a limitless skill for self-mythologising (turning a minor plane crash into heroic works in felt and lard). Yoko Ono married a Beatle and tried to use their celebrity to end war. George Maciunas ruled the movement like a little dictator, excommunicating those who disagreed with him.

Today we have a situation where "anything can be art". Many viewers feel "anyone can do it", but only a small number of people are allowed to do it in galleries and profit from it. Perhaps Fluxus only existed because of the publicity skills and celebrity status of its founders. Perhaps it is impossible to have a democratic art. But insofar as contemporary art draws on Fluxus's concepts of art works while redirecting them in entirely opposite directions of elitism and selfishness (the artist's greed), they have inverted the original ideas of Fluxus and created an art of dubious theoretical basis that naturally invokes resentment and contempt in audiences who know that not only could they create such works, they should be creating them. Fluxus dreamed of destroying the importance of art, but this only succeeded in the public mind, not in the auction house.