In the 1960s, a coalition of artists in New York City formed Fluxus, a movement which aimed to undermine the art world establishment. Fluxus artists worked in a variety of media, including performance art, experimental music, and design—their goal was to remove the divide between art and the rest of life, and to make “high art” accessible to the populous. George Maciunas, considered the founder of Fluxus, met many of the early members of the movement while enrolled in an experimental music class taught by John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York. Other early members of Fluxus included Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, and George Brecht. Notable artists who joined the movement are Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik. Fluxus artists were particularly influenced by Dadaism and the artist Marcel Duchamp in particular, whose “readymade” sculptures posited that anything could be art by virtue of the artist’s intention. Many Fluxus artists incorporated found objects into their work and like Dada artists before them, also embraced absurdity in their work.

Fluxus artists were well known for their interdisciplinary “happenings,” a term popularized by Allan Kaprow. These interactive events were partially scripted and partially left to chance. Ray Johnson, another artist associated with Fluxus, created so-called mail art, a rubric which encompassed postcards, clippings, and found objects that the artist sent to other artists through the postal system. Both happenings and mail art used ephemeral objects or elements—unlike art of the past, they were not intended to last in their original form. The ideas behind Fluxus were extremely influential to developments in performance art, land art, and conceptual art later in the twentieth century.