Dick Higgins/Fluxus quote

June 23, 2009 in Uncategorized

Dick Higgins to George Maciunas, letter, November 19, 1974, Collection Archiv Sohm, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany. From p. 123 of At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet:

I do not believe in amateurishness: that isn’t what it is all about. But in amateurism, is simplicity. An art (by which I also mean non-art, if you prefer, so long as it is aesthetic in some way) on which one cannot hang a cycle of professional crafts and dependence. An art which by its very nature denies its perpetrators their daily bread, which must therefore come from somewhere else. Such an art must be given, in the sense that experience is shared: it cannot be placed in the market place and in this way it differs profoundly from the Fluxus-derived “movements” of earth-works or media-hype forms of concept art. Much of that work I enjoy—I even love . . . I must reject, not because it isn’t officially Fluxus, but because it isn’t free. It’s just so many hat racks for careers to be hung onto. When the name of the artist determines the market value of a work and not its meaning in our lives—beware!