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.
2 comments:
There is a difference and I can't immediately define it either. I think whether it is a conscious "performance" may be key. Living one's life well, or a child kicking a can to impress a friend are not only organic, occurring naturally, but are also unselfconscious. Even "I am putting on a show of (courage, cheerfulness) for a group of friends" is an attempt to achieve that thing in reality, not a mere performance to be judged on merit. One can imagine situations that get farther and farther from that and try to squint and make them the same as performance art, but when people go in that direction we do not see them as being more artistic, but as being a phoney or an imposter. I suppose moving to Greenwich Village and reinventing yourself, lying about where you come from and pretending to have been a hobo, like Bob Dylan did, is as close a match as we can get. Is that performance art? Maybe a cousin to it.
From the description of his work, "art" is a misleading term. No wonder this was Lord Jones Is Dead.
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