Performance

Ann Althouse has a post about Sven Sachsalber's death. I'd never heard of him before (surprise), but one of his oeuveres was "performance art." "In another performance, he ate a species of poisonous mushrooms to experience the particular and unique effect of his vision turning green for two days. And in a performance that became a video work, Sachsalber spent 24 hours in his bedroom with a cow."

I think I can live a contented life without becoming more familiar with his work. I have an almost instinctive aversion to "performance art," but on reflection, the idea doesn't seem entirely crazy.

Lord Byron wrote She walks in beauty, like the night, which is poetic art, but perhaps the lady was an artwork herself. He wrote as though she was. Some of us can write a glorious novel, and some of us seem to live through one.

If you'll excuse the metaphors and stipulate that living is a kind of art, what is the difference between that kind of art and picking through a haystack in a museum looking for a needle? If everyday life can be performed beautifully, are those individual actions, stripped of context, fairly called art?

Maybe my reaction to "performance art" is due to its purpose. The performer isn't kicking the can down the road for the joy of it, or to see which of his buddies can kick it farther. Those are, for want of a better word, "organic" to the performer. But is trying to impress a classmate different in nature from trying to impress an art critic? Perhaps it has to do with the latter being unhindered by any rules.

Maybe I'm wrong, but so far I still think that children kicking cans down the road for fun is a good performance, and an artist doing it for £12,200 is bad art.