George Brecht: 19 interesting facts

George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and broadminded composer, as without difficulty as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil. He was a key enthusiast of, and have emotional impact on, Fluxus, the international organization of militant artists centred on George Maciunas, having been keen with the work from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas’ death in 1978.

One of the originators of ‘participatory’ art, in which the artwork can forlorn be experienced by the sprightly involvement of the viewer, he is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962, (see Video upon YouTube) and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a habit of “ensuring that the details of unexceptional life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”