Top 100 Quotes About Performance Art
#2. We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that.
Joseph Jarman
#3. I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.
Liz Phair
#4. Everything I have is dirty, but I'm sure I can figure something. Maybe I can make a dress out of a garbage bag. Lady Gaga wore that meat dress to the VMA's, so I should be able to dress in a garbage bag. I'll get black ones, to symbolize my current state of mind. Like performance art of something.
Lauren Barnholdt
#5. Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
Clive James
#6. My individual power is limited. I want to use my high-profile way to wake people up to take action together to do good things. I can only awake them with my performance art and creativity.
Chen Guangbiao
#7. Performance art is the ultimate in creativity. Since it has so many possibilities at creativity, it's essence tends to become creativity.
Jack Bowman
#8. [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.
Michael Kimmelman
#9. Politics with me isn't theater. It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.
Roger Stone
#10. Being on the run wasn't fun, but it was something I had to do. I was actually working in legitimate jobs. I wasn't living on people's credit cards. I was living like a character out of a movie. It was performance art.
Kevin Mitnick
#11. When a person encounters his own statue and takes a hammer to it, performance art adds depth to greatness.
Bauvard
#12. I'd been used to this idea of destructive performance art instead of a slick, good-sounding show. So, I became frustrated as I felt I'd been doing the shows wrong. That sucked.
Erika M. Anderson
#13. Greed is the performance art of the 21st Century.
A.E. Samaan
#14. My father was a painter and an anarchist, always getting in trouble for his performance art.
Sadie Frost
#15. A performance art piece is unprecedented. It is difficult to censor since it has a good possibility of never being done before.
Jack Bowman
#16. Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.
Jack Bowman
#17. From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.
Marina Abramovic
#18. A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.
Roberta Smith
#19. I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'
Lady Gaga
#20. A lot of festivals can be a jumble of electronic music and rock and roll, and everything's all mixed up - some things are more performance art or light shows or dance parties, and then you'll have a singer-songwriter stuck in the middle to make the changeovers easier.
Jenny O.
#21. First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.
Marina Abramovic
#22. Quinn talked with her entire body: arms, eyes, shoulders, mouth. She was performance art, so alive that sometimes he argued with her just so he could watch her flush and gesture.
Jennifer Crusie
#23. Just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art.
Kathleen Hanna
#24. I went to a performance-art high school, and a teacher there was signing me up for open-mic nights at the comedy club. I think about it now, and I think, 'Well, that may be inappropriate,' but it was great!'
Margaret Cho
#25. When I was coming up with the Hal Hartley films, I was cast as a no one. I had no name visibility. I was working at a downtown post-performance-art, avant garde theater company and doing a couple things on television. But I was a total unknown.
Martin Donovan
#26. Performance art is really about the sociology of the artist, where ideas come from, and the confluence of those ideas.
Roselee Goldberg
#27. We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.
Regina King
#28. I realized [using my own voice] is what creates the performance in the performance art and that's what helps creates the distance for the viewers, like the distance that I get when I step back.
Kalup Linzy
#29. It's always been performance art, but now it's on a different level.
Mark Roberts
#30. I'm extremely critical. I don't consider myself a performance artist. I balk at the term performance art.
Kalan Sherrard
#31. I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.
Amanda Palmer
#32. Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting.
Jack Bowman
#33. I'm trying to create flesh architecture. I aim to get a sculptural feel for groups of bodies, as well as create performance art.
Spencer Tunick
#34. Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it's more casual but more interesting.
Yoko Ono
#35. HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.
Tom Stoppard
#36. I went to art school for fine art and then I started doing performance art, and then I started making fun of performance art, and it turned into comedy.
Mary Lynn Rajskub
#37. I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn't exist without the performance-art element.
Lady Gaga
#38. It was at a performance art space that's no longer around, Gusto House ... All of these great performers from all over the country lived on the Lower East Side, and they would take somebody's living room that opened right onto the street, open the door and charge tickets and put up chairs.
John Leguizamo
#39. Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.
Ryan Kavanaugh
#40. Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.
Edmund White
#41. Because watercolor actually moves on the paper, it is the most active of all mediums, almost a performance art.
Nita Engle
#42. [Washington, DC] feels like you're watching performance art. A lot of the time. I don't believe them, I don't believe what they say, I don't think they're being absolutely sincere. I think it's performance art. And most of them are bad actors.
Kevin Spacey
#43. We're all so mauled by information, but it's recycled information. We need to shut it out. So, you've got to get bizarre. This is an artist's purpose - to break away from the recycled. Performance art can do that.
Jack Bowman
#44. When it comes to performance art, I am more interested in the failures then the so-called successes. I have never cared for entertaining anyone.
Vaginal Davis
#45. I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.
Mike Figgis
#46. It would have to be connected with performance art somehow, either in the front of the house or the back. I was myopic about this from fourth grade on.
James Marsters
#47. All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.
Jack Bowman
#49. If I took a candy bar, ripped off the wrapper, ate the candy bar, and pinned the wrapper to the wall, is that art, performance art, both, or neither?
Jarod Kintz
#50. I spent all of my childhood at a performance art camp. Putting on plays, it was more like commedia dell'arte. It wasn't career-oriented in any way. It was more fun and therapeutic, so I never really thought of it as something I would end up doing. I was more convinced I was going to be a painter.
Troy Garity
#51. Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.
Laurie Anderson
#52. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.
Patrick Swift
#53. The problem with our art form: it's so ephemeral, and catching performances can be so difficult ... the important thing is what happens at the moment of performance, for the people who made the effort to be there: it lives with them.
Judith Weir
#54. Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance
Garry Kasparov
#55. It's a good note for any young hopeful in this business to take: study up and make sure you are informed at all times because knowing how to anticipate someone's subtle nuances in a performance will only elevate your own art!
Tisha Campbell-Martin
#56. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.
Antony Gormley
#57. I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?
Nicolas Cage
#58. There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general ... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.
Haley Joel Osment
#59. In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
Vladimir Nabokov
#60. Food, she decided, was like performance rather than fine art: its power was in its transience and immediacy.
Hannah Mary Rothschild
#62. I loved it when my heart beat quickly and erratically. Yet I found this performance, which was deeply poetic, more enjoyable.
Raymond Radiguet
#63. I consider myself a showman, and I love magic, and I love art, and I love performance, and they're all separate.
David Blaine
#64. Technology is 50% of rock 'n' roll - the magic, the art, the performance. If you don't have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you're totally naked.
Patti Smith
#65. No work of art is ever finished, nothing is ever static, no performance is for keeps.
Uta Hagen
#66. When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.
James Arthur
#67. I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art.
Jack Nicholson
#68. I don't mind being sexy, but on my terms. To this day, I love sexuality. I love the art of sexuality. I love Lady Gaga and the performance of sexuality. The mysterious, the artistic and the slightly perverse. I'm interested in all that.
Helen Mirren
#70. There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.
Chris Jordan
#71. Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.
Marina Abramovic
#72. Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
#73. Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
Marina Abramovic
#74. No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. Great acting is as much about the choices a performer makes as it is about their ability.
Stewart Stafford
#76. The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.
Freeman Dyson
#77. Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art.
Matthew McConaughey
#78. Personality is essential. It is in every work of art. When someone walks on stage for a performance and has charisma, everyone is convinced that he has personality. I find that charisma is merely a form of showmanship. Movie stars usually have it. A politician has to have it.
Lukas Foss
#79. A frequent change of role, and of the lighter sort - especially such as one does not like forcing one's self to use the very utmost of his ability in the performance of - is the training requisite for a mastery of the actor's art.
Edwin Booth
#80. The best form of endurance exercise is the performance of the event.
Bruce Lee
#81. Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
Ernest Hemingway,
#82. The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves ...
Peter Drucker
#83. For me, the idea of curating can be expanded. Curating science, curating art, music and theater and performance and not only bring those things into art but bring art into those areas.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#84. Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.
Lewis Mumford
#85. I love skating. I love the speed, the power, the excitement, the feeling that
even for just a moment
I can defy gravity and fly through the air. And I love the way that a great skating performance, like any work of art, can move an audience to laughter or tears.
Brian Boitano
#86. If you don't have shadows, you're not in the light.
Lady Gaga
#87. Stand-up is probably the most solo performance in art.
Louis C.K.
#88. A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.
Franz Grillparzer
#89. The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.
Marina Abramovic
#90. Performance shots are a waste of time, they look like everyone else's. If you want to shoot a performer, then grab them, own them, you have to own people, then twist them into what you want to say about them.
Art Kane
#91. The most important thing about Jazz at Lincoln Center is the fact that it's the first time that perhaps the most important art form in American culture has a place to really exhibit itself and dedicated to its own particular conditions of performance.
Rafael Vinoly
#92. I feel I have a responsibility to myself, a responsibility to explain where we're coming from. Because a song or the performance of a song is a lot like a work of art.
Axl Rose
#93. If I look at the performance of another friend Sting, whenever I hear him take over a stage and share his art with millions, it's very inspiring to me. So I have a lot in my life, a lot of friends who inspire me and I'm sure it goes the other way around, or so that I inspire them.
Philippe Petit
#94. As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
Gavin Bryars
#95. I am a she. The mask is a he, or is actually gender-neutral. People love the character.
K. Guillory
#96. Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.
Sarah Kay
#97. I strive for perfection, but of course it can never be perfect. I'm never satisfied at the end of a performance. But the great thing about live theatre is that every night you get another chance to get it right.
Anthony Warlow
#98. Some reviewers have read this as cynicism but I don't see it that way. When I say "I am so sick / of pretending to be me," it's exhaustion at the everyday performance, in life, in art, even in our most intimate encounters.
Randall Mann
#99. The passion that transforms life, and art, did not seem to be mine. But in all essentials, my life was a good performance.
Josephine Hart
#100. When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning.
Meg Howrey
