They sorted lentils from rice and then went off to embrace a tree while everyone told us how important performance art is. As TV viewing, this was embarrassing, boring and oddly low-brow
There is a Pied Piper quality to the world’s most famous performance artist Marina Abramović. She holds audiences spellbound and seems to deliver some purgative transformational electricity. I can’t feel it myself and was constantly itching to switch over throughout her heroically egotistical “takeover” of Sky Arts. I refocused, though, when a participant offered a couple of surprising comparisons.
“Mussolini was a performance artist,” said artist Franko B in a documentary segment of the long, long evening, adding: “Hitler was a performance artist”. There was no comeback to this apparent acclaim for the Great Dictators. All we got by way of contextualisation was a clip of Hitler speaking.