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The Antiauthoritarian Manifesto of the Situationist Avant Garde (January 1961)

By the early 1960s, a "situationist" avant garde in cities such as Munich began to rebel against the reimposition of bourgeois respectability after the Second World War. It proclaimed the unleashing of creativity and the revolutionizing of social relations under the banner of promoting "fun."

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JANUARY MANIFESTO

1. Whoever does not see politics, government, church, industry, military, the political parties, and social organizations as a joke has nothing to do with us.

2. Boycott all ruling systems and conventions by viewing them as nothing but a joke that went awry.

3. All true artists were born to change their surroundings.

4. Awards, scholarships, good reviews: they give us everything. But one thing is for certain, we are of no use.

5. Our highest goal is to be useless: joking around is unpopular folk art.

6. The whole world is the sphere in which the artistic impulse that is reserved for fun alone can unfold.

7. Everything that can be used is not for people. Without artists there would already be no more people.

8. We are opposed to Mardi Gras carnival celebrations, because they commercialize fun. Misusing fun is the greatest crime.

9. Art for art’s sake is over, as is art for money and art for women. This marks the beginning of art for fun.

10. Being creative means: having fun with everything by constantly creating new things.

11. Being human means homo ludens and homo gaudens.

12. Fun has not been an integrating factor in culture since the ascendancy of dialectic materialism and determinism. We demand its liberation from oppression by the prevailing ideologies and rationalism.

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