Thank you very much Allen, even if I don't share all of your views: people like Emmett Williams, Ben Patterson, Ben Vautier, or Takako Saito are much welcoming younger artists' works, and are very pleased to perform with them. Ben Vautier, who is so easily denigrated for his commitment with advertising and business proposals, is also a very important producer for young artists in the south of France, and has supported, by his influence, his relationships, and his money, dozens of projects since the begining (from Olivier Mosset (one of the members of BMPT) to La station, through the Figuration Libre). Ben Patterson have worked a lot with Eastern Europe artistic collectives, donated several master works of his to them, and performed for free with them to support their activities. Emmett always looked carefully at young artists, and he recently co-curated the exhibition in Wiesbaden in 2002 with Rene Block. This exhibition, was very controversial because of his choice to exhibit only young artists under the banner of Fluxus (Fluxus und die Folgende), and none of the "original group of Fluxus artists and anything they are still doing under the Fluxus banner" to quote you, apart of an exhibition of Emmett's own archive. However, it's true to say that Ken and Dick Higgins did much more to enlarge Fluxus and welcome new "members" within its circle, but, having done what I have done since two years, I'd like to say that the "core of historical Fluxus" have amazed me by its generosity and kindship. I 'm probably a bit young in the circuit (compared to Ken and Emily) so I haven't yet have the time to do things to be gossiped (there, it's possible I'm wrong...but no one told me about...yet), but, frankly, I've been really touched by the great simplicity of these artists, far from prima donna behaviours. Once again, I'm very young in this and still naive.
On the other hand, I've seen people attending to concerts, grasping any smallest relief of performance to have it signed by any of the people they had seen on the stage, even me, and even stuff that was not to be given away. I remember for instance a young girl, working in an art gallery, who wanted to have a wonderful leftover from "one for violin" performed by Ben Vautier(you know, not the kind of little piece of wood, but a very nicely crashed violin, quite esthetic, as a matter of fact), signed by him, harrassing him for ten minutes, while he was signing small parts of anything for everyone, exhausted after two hours of a very tiring concert. Bertrand
