The occasion for the art competition, announced in the in the August 14 issue of The New York Review of Books, was to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1956 revolution in Hungary and was sponsored by Timothy Garton Ash, Danilo Kis, George Konrad, and Susan Sontag. The artworks were meant to be exhibited and then auctioned to raise funds for the illegally working civil organization (SZETA).