NO!art is a radical avant-garde anti-art-establishment movement started in 1959 by Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, based out of the cooperative March Gallery on East 10th Street, then later uptown at Gallery: Gertrude Stein. The group gained notoriety with exhibitions entitled Doom, Involvement, and Vulgar, which dealt with a range of subjects including war, genocide, violence, racism, nuclear proliferation, consumerism, pornography, and the emerging art economy. The principal aim of NO!art was for total unabashed self-expression in art leading to social involvement. Thus it stood in opposition to the two emerging commercial movements of the era, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
Lurie outlines their agenda in the introduction to NO!art Pin-ups, Excrement, Protest, Jew-Art (with Seymour Krim, 1988):
No understanding of Radical - as opposed to market-oriented art - is possible without background information on NO!art, it occupies the strategic juncture where artistic production and socio-cultural action meet….seminal works [date] from about 1955 and individual later works dealing with "Women's Liberation," the new antisemitism, postrevolutionary violence, postrevolutionary sadomasochism are included. The origins of NO!art sprout from the Jewish experience, struck root in the world's largest Jewish community, New York, a product of armies, concentration camps, Lumpenproletariat artists. Its targets are the hypocritical intelligentsia, capitalist culture manipulation, consumerism, American and other Molochs. Their aim total unabashed self-expression in art leading to social involvement. Collective confrontation artists as early as the Peace Demonstrations of 1961-62. No lighthearted Duchampesque Dadaists, Neodadaists, or "pop-artists"; no consumerism's middle class nor Nouveau Riche Liberals' neuter background makers. But believers in the unfashionable notion of Art with a capital "A".