Everyone is a Performance Artist Now

I was getting lunch with a friend with whom I sometimes struggle to find things to talk about. We were seated on either side of a rectangular table with a 90s-style world map underneath it. I started pointing at places on the map and saying the first thing that came to mind. This was rather uninspiring since I'm not well-traveled. There is only so much one can talk secondhand about how Longyearbyen, Norway, has more polar bears than people. Then my friend started narrating his route for a road trip he undertook several years ago from Alaska to the southernmost tip of Argentina. The conversation suddenly came alive, and at that moment, I knew the map and him would make it into the newsletter at some point. Everyday life is performance art for this 'sletter, not much unlike the day in the life videos of a 23-year-old product manager or a guy writing about parties he goes to in New York City. Everyone is a performance artist now.

The term for this approach to art, as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s, is relational aesthetics: "A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." In his book, Bourriaud talks about avant-garde practitioners of relational art in the 80s and 90s. For example, Alix Lambert explored the sheer convenience of getting married and divorced with her work Wedding Piece. For this, she went through marriage and divorce with 2 men and a woman in the span of 6 months. In the 1980s, artist Peter Fend incorporated a company as part of his exhibit on climate change. Anyone could be a shareholder in the company. An investment of $1,000 or more bought an original cartographic drawing or photograph of the kind seen in his show.

These avant-garde examples pale in comparison to performance artists of the present day. YouTuber MrBeast cured blindness for 1000 people. As I write this, I notice he just posted a new video, "1000 deaf people hear for the first time." Peter Fend's corporation that sells artworks for shares is dwarfed by projects such as Nouns.wtf, where several thousand people raise funds for projects they find interesting through buying NFTs. The modern-day pinnacle of relational art in the mainstream is likely Nathan Fielder, who, much more imaginatively than Alix Lambert, tricks a man into getting married to him by having the wedding officiated in Mandarin under the guise of ordering food at a Chinese restaurant.

Everyone is a performance artist now because all of us have been extremely well-trained to know what would make good content. You have a good ear for what song would be perfect for TikTok. You understand your audience and know how to make your Instagram stories look "curated" but not "try hard." In his book, Burglar's Guide to the City, architect Geoff Manaugh describes how bank robbers and thieves perceive the architecture of the city differently. In a series of examples of robberies executed through digging tunnels, Manaugh illustrates how robbers are aware of the hidden topology of cities, such as rivers and old unused drainages running under the city. Where you see miles of concrete, the robber sees hidden escape routes and blind spots in police surveillance. Similarly, when people brought up on the internet look at physical infrastructure, they intuitively know what parts of it would make good content. Nobody wins or losses in this performance art. It's an infinite game where you play to keep playing because of the infinite demand for content.

In a previous piece, I wrote about Walter Benjamin's idea of aura -20th-century art being marked by its nonavailability, enjoyable only in a specific context, and how the internet has changed that. Relational aesthetics stands to reclaim some of the aura of art because relational art becomes more enjoyable the closer you are to the artist and what is being created. Mike Crumplar's substack is a good example of this. Although written as a satirical critique of the New York art scene, everyone wants to know if they or someone they know made it to the new edition of the Crumpstack. The enjoyment of the art comes from being associated with it.

The creeping in of relational aesthetic elements in everyday life signals perhaps that modern art is less of a static exhibit and takes the form of a time to be lived through, as Bourriaud says:

"What is collapsing before our very eyes is nothing other than this falsely aristocratic conception of the arrangement of works of art, associated with the feeling of territorial acquisition. In other words, it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the "owner's tour" is akin to the collector's). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion."