They’re not performance artists!  I write this in response to Richard Lacayo’s Time.com entry “Sacha Baron Cohen: Performance Artist”, in which he compares Michael Jackson’s life, and Baron Cohen’s work (of which I’m a big fan), with Anthony Gormley’s One & Other piece for which Brits can apply to stand atop a fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and do stuff.  Sure these things are commensurable, but one of the practical realities of the art economy (as opposed to the philosophical notion that anything can mean anything so long as one person experiences it that way) — an economy of display, circulation, and discourse — is that in order for anything to be art, two conditions are required: self-proclamation, and assimilation.  Self-proclamation means that the author must view, understand, and proclaim the work as art.  Assimilation means that the work must be assimilable, which is to say visible and legible as art, to the arbiters of the art economy.  Without this legibility, there can be no discourse, and so no collective recognition or acceptance of the work as art can emerge.  The social Web complicates this notion of assimilation a bit because anyone can produce a node of discourse, and claim that, say, Roger Federer is an artist (like I do ALL the time), or that Barack Obama is an artist, and technically it is accessible to art world arbiters (as in not entirely isolated as a diary locked in a drawer in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico would be), but these nodes are generally ineffectual and do not enter the stream of contemporary art discourse.  I am reminded of the an essay by Bill Arning in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, in which he reflects on Joseph Beuys’ proclamation “Jeder Mensch ist ein Kunstler” (roughly: every man is an artist), adding: yeah, but only one guy gets to be the person that says that…

The context of art is a privileged context, where one is situated in a historical lineage of art.  It’s also a privileged context in that one receives a certain respect along with people’s time and intellectual energy.  To annex ‘Michael Jackson’s life’ into the history of performance art simply because it was theatrical, witnessed by a wide public, and spectacular (in the Debordian sense), is only wordplay because his life did not have artistic intent inline with that which is understood as performance art.  Furthermore, it did not have a planned durational bracket, as even the work of Tehching Hsieh, who shrunk his own life into his art, always did.  The difficulty of assimilating Hsieh’s life-as-work into the 1980’s art discourse meant he wouldn’t be widely recognized until the surge of interest in performance and Asian art in the mid-nineties, and demonstrates in order for something to ‘be art’ it must first be socially reified by a few thousand art-people worldwide.  Unless a good number of those people care, it ain’t art in the sense Lacayo is talking about.  The general non-contemporary-art-following public doesn’t know about this system, and it’s irresponsible to tell them with short-shrift in 200 words that Michael Jackson’s life is performance art when there are ten thousand self-acknowledging performance artists dying, figuratively, to be accepted into that system.

Got the idea to write this post from Art Fag City.