The fluxus paradox
http://www.balticmill.com/whatsOn/present/index.php
The ongoing fluxus exhibition at the Baltic Gallery in Gateshead sounds intriguing, there is however no chance of me being able to go, so I have been trying to attend in proxy by reading reviews and online articles instead.
Any art movement that proclaims itself anti-art is immediately defining itself as paradoxical and paradox seems to be the pith of what fluxus was about, it succeeded in being at once all-embracing and rigidly exclusivist, libertarian and totalitarian, profound and trite, the province of the visionary and of the charlatan.
I think eventualy fluxus' paradoxical elementalism eventually had it's ultimate confirmation in the fact that it became in essence a self-negating entity, rather than overturning art it overturned itself, almost cancelling it's original energy out, before becoming assimilated - in a purely presentationalist way - into the mainstream.
Adrian Searle in this - http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/dec/10/art - Guardian article writes "Fluxus never went down well with collectors. Never mind that fluxus work rarely cost anything to make, and not much more to buy, and its single laudable aesthetic premise was to avoid wasting resources. The problem for most art collectors was that fluxus was too cheap and too ephemeral".
This element of fluxus certainly has not been absorbed by contemporary mainstream art, the art of Hirst and his contemporaries may wear the vestments of fluxus but the real radicalism of their work is most eloquently expressed in the price tag.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/13/damienhirst.art