Anne Midgette: “In fact, Cage was anything but a clown, though like many profound thinkers who are profoundly misunderstood, he did nothing to counteract people’s misimpressions. … So why was he so important? The short answer is that Cage was in the vanguard of a way of thinking about art that became central to many artists after him, testing its mores and meanings and definitions. Where does the ‘real world’ end and ‘art’ begin; what makes one object ‘art’ and not another; what defines a performance?”