ABSTRACT
Once disillusioned Musician disparity from institutional reality could not be denied, the vision of an artists' Cockaigne became a mere public relations pitch. Utopian yearnings to perfect the social organization of artistic production have surfaced during earlier waves of Utopian socialism. The imagination of "'open sharing" in a "community of the arts" which transcended disciplinary boundaries had—like other Utopian conceptions of the sixties—assumed a "post-scarcity" situation. Early planners spoke of the school's future library as a "research facility for the artist rivalling the one MIT offers the scientist"—a facility so heavily computerized that "information would fall into one's lap at the poke of a button. The trustees' announcement that parts of the building program would have to be indefinitely postponed and the equipment budget cut for lack of funding, shattered the fantasy of unlimited financial resources which had underpinned so many other Utopian projections.
