Cancellation
Over time the management of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum began to balk at some of the more extreme artworks submitted to the Yomiuri Indépendant. In 1958, the Exhibition saw its first rejected artwork, when the Kyūshū-ha group tried to display a work called Garbage Artwork that consisted of a pile of actual garbage. During the 1962 event, museum curators summarily removed artist Ushio Nakazawa's vinyl bag of red ink, over which visitors were supposed to walk and thereby "create art" by tracking red ink all over the museum. Later that year, the museum issued an edict banning a number of objects and artworks from its premises, including certain types of nude photographs deemed obscene, swords and other weapons, foodstuffs that might smell or rot, works producing loud noises, and artworks using water, sand, gravel or other materials that were damaging the museum floors and walls. Art critics including Shūzō Takiguchi, Ichirō Hariu, Yoshiaki Tōno, and Tamon Miki immediately protested these new restrictions, calling them "very troubling for freedom of expression," but to no avail. The artists themselves also protested, and police had to be called in to physically remove a group of artists dancing outside the museum in their underwear in protest. Artists also simply ignored the restrictions, and the 1963 edition of the exhibition (which proved to be the last) featured, among other forbidden objects, a bath bucket filled with water, knives, glass fragments, loud and raucous use of a steel drum, and artworks incorporating perishable foodstuffs, including a French roll, udon, bean sprouts, and tofu.
Barely a month before the 1964 Yomiuri Indépendant was scheduled to open, amid rumors that the upcoming artworks would be even wilder and more bizarre than ever before, the Yomiuri Shimbun suddenly announced that it was terminating its sponsorship of the exhibition, and when no new sponsor stepped forward, the Yomiuri Indépendant came to an end after 15 years of annual shows. In announcing the termination, the newspaper declared the exhibition's mission fully accomplished, stating, "We believe the time has come for artists to manage their own affairs. Confident that we've attained our objectives, we of the Yomiuri Shimbun have concluded our sponsorship with last year's exhibition." The newspaper had clearly concluded that it had milked the exhibition for as much positive public relations value as it could, and that continuing the exhibition amid anger from museum officials and complaints from museum visitors in fact risked negative publicity.
Many artists were stunned by the last-minute cancellation. Akasegawa noted ironically that by deliberately violating the museum's rules, "the unconscious destructive energy of the artworks had destroyed the space itself." Nevertheless, the Yomiuri was not incorrect in noting that the original objective of democratizing the art world had been achieved; by 1964, the Japanese art world was a vastly different space than it had been in the 1950s, one fundamentally more welcoming to avant-garde art. Indeed, the artists had little trouble finding alternative venues to display the works they had prepared for the 1964 Yomiuri Indépendant, showing them in a host of new, small-scale museums, galleries, and exhibitions that had cropped up in recent years.
