17 Facts About Henry Flynt

Henry Flynt coined the term "concept art" in the early 1960s, during which time he was associated with figures in the Fluxus scene.

Henry Flynt later received attention for his anti-art demonstrations against New York cultural institutions in 1963 and 1964.

Henry Flynt was born and raised in North Carolina, where he first studied classical violin.

Henry Flynt became interested in logical positivism as a teenager, and later attended Harvard University on a scholarship, where he studied mathematics alongside companions Tony Conrad and John Alten.

At Harvard, Flynt was introduced to jazz and the "New Music" of John Cage by graduate students Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski, and he discovered country blues music through Samuel Charters's 1959 book on the subject at this time.

Henry Flynt soon dropped out and visited New York in 1960, where through Conrad he was introduced to La Monte Young and other figures in the city's avant-garde scene.

In 1960 and 1961, Henry Flynt took part in the monthly concert series held at Yoko Ono's Chambers Street loft.

Henry Flynt's work developed from what he called "cognitive nihilism", a concept he first announced in the 1960 and 1961 drafts of a paper called Philosophy Proper.

Henry Flynt maintained that, to merit the label concept art, a work had to be a critique of logic or mathematics in which the material is a linguistic concept, a quality which he claims is absent from subsequent "conceptual art".

In 1962, Henry Flynt began to campaign for an anti-art approach to the arts.

From 1964 to 1966, Henry Flynt wrote regularly for the WWP's Workers World under the pseudonym "Harry Stone", and edited the newspaper briefly in 1965.

Henry Flynt left the party in 1967 after becoming dissatisfied with the party's support of the Soviet Union.

Henry Flynt is known for musical work that attempts to fuse hillbilly music with the avant-garde, often with him performing on violin or guitar.

Henry Flynt performed duets with La Monte Young in the 1960s, but recordings of these performances were rejected by Mainstream Records employee Earle Brown as being too unconventional for a classical label.

Henry Flynt briefly performed violin with the Velvet Underground in 1966 as a fill-in for John Cale, and received guitar lessons from Lou Reed.

Henry Flynt's philosophical writing attempts to sketch out a post-capitalist, post-scientific civilization which would be at odds with the current civilization's values.

From about 1980, Henry Flynt has written on philosophy and economics in mostly unpublished papers, focusing on two concepts which did not achieve the notoriety of the early actions: his concepts of meta-technology and personhood theory.