Assault of any kind is reprehensible. And…
She set the tone for the kinds of things people would do to her by giving explicit consent for anything anyone cared to do and including a gun as one of the things to use.
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Your aesthetic theory could only be more interesting than reducing art to a popularity contest.
If you see the value of art as its longevity through history, that would seem to put any performance art at a disadvantage. I see more value in complete ephemera, that the most vital work is that which is impossible to commoditize, precisely because it can be experienced only directly, as an expression directly from the artist to another.
Whereas it would be very sweet to be considered an endless wrangler, I make a point to not trust my own impulses.
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OK, I’m not going to bite, but only to give a nibble that’s also a niggle: Consider the possibility of an equivocation on the term “value.” The “value of art [as a human pursuit]” is distinct from “the value [good/bad/dull/etc.] of a given work of art.” The former points to aesthetic theory*, and the latter to evaluative criticism–the assignment of relative value–that is, good art/bad art/great art/major art/minor art, and so on.
[*] And perhaps other fields related to questions of why-do-humans-do-art-and-how-does-it-work.
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Anyone who has seen bad performance art, arguably the majority of it, knows that it can be so wretched that it is kinda hard to forget even though you know there is no there there. I was in a band once where during practice I suggested the we try improvising something in no key and no time signature. The singer sang something like…scat, I guess. This actually turned out to harder than we thought. Dammit! I’m in E again. Or, fuck 4/4. The result was weird noise. That we liked so much that we figured, hey The Next are playing Raul’s. They’ll let us onstage for a bit. Gawd nose, we stunned some people. Most of course just went out back, but we impressed enough to be invited for a bigger show. But that was to be the last time. We’d done it; it was finished. It was, at least, remembered by many 
Laurie Anderson is considered a performance artist. Her music, when first heard, was fascinating, if odd. I liked her stuff, but it seemed a bit cold; no emotional connect. Until I saw the Strange Angels tour. It was what I expected at first, but then it made me laugh and by the end I was in tears.
So I have a lot of respect for some of these shows, if they are good. Sometimes I have to learn to understand them.
And just to give you something interesting, here’s David Bowie performing O Superman with Laurie herownself. The video is bad, but it doesn’t matter.
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[quote]Museum visiting is not evenly spread in the population. However, audience research shows that the demographic characteristics of museum visitors has remained fairly stable, both over time and across studies that have been undertaken in many different countries.
Generically, museum visitors typically:
- are more highly educated, with post-secondary education likely in the humanities or arts;
- are either primary school aged children, or adults aged between thirty and fifty;
- visit with the family or other social groups;
- are in a higher socio-economic class, and
- visited museums as children.[/quote]
Things may be different over there, but I doubt it.
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Granted, a higher percentage of museum visitors are liberals. But to make the leap that a handful of perpetrators are thus more likely to be liberal is basically a guess, since these statistics only apply to large numbers; as soon as you get into incidents involving a small handful (or so) of people, all bets are off. For example, I could make the argument that physical violence tends to be perpetrated more by conservatives, and thus the people involved in these incidents are more likely to be conservative.
Again, statistics are only meaningful when looking at statistically significant numbers. Anything less than that can be twisted according to any other criteria.
Or maybe they were there just for the cheap white wine…
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Sometimes it’s dangerous to skim…
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When I was in art college, some friends were eager to go to a senior show of performance art. Some of it was interesting if not original (someone did a a Mummenchanz sort of thing) but I remember one guy who had assistants zip him up in a Coleman sleeping bag and he squirmed around on the floor for ten minutes, then got out and said “the daily life of a slug,” and bowed. Another guy just got up and would walk around, staring at women in the audience while reading “poetry” that consisted of stuff like “I want to fuck you, and rape you, and love you, and eat you out,” all with his pants unzipped – deeply creepy. All of this was most definitely Bad Art, but on the other hand, I still remember it 20 years later.
Performance art has a bad reputation, but when it’s done intelligently and creatively, like Abramovic and (surprising to me) Yoko Ono, it’s Art.
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Offered without comment:
This sculpture, you’ll notice, is a tube sticking out of an orange cardboard box. You’re wondering, Is there something I’m missing? No, there is not. This is bad sculpture.
–River Clegg, “Honest Museum Audio Tour,” The New Yorker, 12/5/16
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More of that here.
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Pretty sure if I had been part of the audience the first thing I would have done was remove the live round from the revolver and placed the round safely in my pocket. Fuck that - a loaded gun being passed around? I don’t care how radical a piece of art you are trying to make, that’s just dangerous, and stupid. And this from a guy who once made an art piece for a Devival (Praise BOB!) that had a moving record player platter with razor blades glued to it.
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