"In the fall of 1961, [Yoko] Ono gave a concert in Carnegie Recital Hall.... Onstage, twenty artists and musicians performed different acts—eating, breaking dishes, throwing bits of newspaper."

"At designated intervals, a toilet was flushed offstage. A man was positioned at the back of the hall to give the audience a sense of foreboding. A huddle of men with tin cans tied to their legs attempted to cross the stage without making noise. The dancers Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown sat down and stood up repeatedly. According to the Village Voice, the performance finished with Ono’s amplified 'sighs, breathing, gasping, retching, screaming—many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with a jibberish of foreign-sounding language that was no language at all.'... When conceptual artists hit the big time, at the end of the nineteen-sixties, her name was virtually never mentioned.... When Ono and Lennon married, she was a coterie artist and he was a popular entertainer.... She decided that condescension to popular entertainment is a highbrow prejudice. As she put it, 'I came to believe that avant-garde purity was just as stifling as just doing a rock beat over and over.' So she became a pop star.... When 'Imagine' was released, one of Ono’s instruction pieces from 'Grapefruit' was printed on the back cover: 'Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.'"

Writes Louis Menand in "Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance Before she met John Lennon, she was a significant figure in avant-garde circles and had created a masterpiece of conceptual art. Did celebrity deprive her of her due as an artist?" (The New Yorker).