Can you buy performance art?

There was a time when the point of performance art was to get punters through the doors of art galleries. It was ephemeral. There was nothing “tangible” to sell. Prospective buyers would have wondered what it was they were actually supposed to be buying. That question looks to have been answered.

A fortnight ago, “A Performance Affair”, a four-day art fair, brought together 30 performance artists in Brussels. British conceptual artist David Rickard sat in a shop window, wearing a respirator mask attached to a silver balloon. As Rickard breathed, the balloon inflated. Once the balloon was fully puffed up, Rickard tied it off and started anew. By the time the art work, entitled Exhaust, had run its course, Rickard aimed to have inflated around 100 balloons.

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“Eight years ago, we’d just sell limited-edition photographs of the performance,” Will Lunn, the director of the London-based Copperfield gallery, tells Scott Reyburn in The New York Times. At this fair – the second of its kind – “you can acquire the performance”. A one-off enactment of Exhaust, complete with documentation, the balloons and respirator, costs €10,000.

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Belgian artist Ariane Loze was also at the fair, sat at a table laid with china plates and cups. Her piece, Le Banquet (pictured top), had the artist voicing different characters at a stuffy, bourgeois dinner party. For €495, the collector receives a limited edition set of the scripts. Evann Siebens, a Vancouver-based former ballet dancer, whose work involves gestures, captures the performance in a video, which is uploaded onto a memory stick and placed inside a presentation box for €1,000.

A market in experiences

For all of the billions of pounds-worth of art that passes under the hammers at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips, not one has been an item of live performance art, notes Reyburn. Yet, with the rise of social media, and the growing trend that values experiences over material things, it’s a section of the art market that is growing. This year’s Brussels’ fair featured seven more artists than in 2018.

“The fair’s founders, Liv Vaisberg and Will Kerr, are hoping to help build a sustainable market around the genre,” says Kate Brown on Artnet News. So this year, for the first time, the performances had to conform to a schedule and the exhibitors had to spell out how the work could be “reactivated once acquired” and whether the objects in the piece were included in the sale.

Serbian artist Marina Abramovic is someone who has proven that performance artists can achieve greatness in their careers. She “is an art-world superstar, a pioneer of performance”, says Mark Brown in The Guardian. Yet even she would perhaps struggle to fulfill that last requirement concerning the objects in performances – especially when it comes to her 1977 work Imponderabilia – had she ever tried to “sell” them.

The Royal Academy (no less) is recreating the performance as part of a retrospective next year. The performance involves the “art viewer” attempting to squeeze through a narrow doorway flanked by a man and a woman, both of whom are naked. And not an object in sight.

This article was originally published in MoneyWeek