ABSTRACT
Smithson's Amarillo Ramp, De Maria's Lightning Field, Heizer's Complex One—all were funded by private patrons, and none was ever offered for sale. If commerce leaves a taint, as many suspect it does, then these earthworks attained a kind of purity. Their liberation from commerce seemed a natural benefit of the western habitat. The frontier, we like to believe, is freedom's homeland, though the idea of eluding the market originated in the art world's urban precincts. In 1961 Allan Kaprow pointed out that "a Happening is not a commodity." Vanishing as it appears, its only residue is "a state of mind. A scarcity of goods discourages markets. In 1965 the critic Barbara Rose argued that objects, too, can resist commercial exploitation if they display a properly off-putting attitude.
