Top 35 Performance Art Quotes

‘Billy on the Street’ is a persona. It’s crafted; it has writers. It’s a mixture of performance art and comedy.

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.

It’s always weird when it comes to awards and awards season because how can you say that this performance is better than this performance? Art is so subjective.

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.

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.

We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that.

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.

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.

My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author’s voice really is.

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.

Politics with me isn’t theater. It’s performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.

I’d done performance art sporadically from about 1976 – very personal street things on my own. Acting seemed like a natural step from that. But I didn’t really want to ‘be’ anything: presenter, comic, actor. I just wanted to perform.

Performance art is the ultimate in creativity. Since it has so many possibilities at creativity, it’s essence tends to become creativity.

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.

I guess that I was always considered a little too weird for the standup clubs and probably too jokey for doing performance art and those places where those are done.

I like money but I love performance art and it goes hand in hand. I’m not the ‘Titanic,’ I’m ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ I’m not a blockbuster, I’m a cult classic. I think my strong but cult-like fanbase expects me to challenge norms.

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.

I love fame. I love being written about. I don’t really mind if people think I’m a bad writer, if they don’t understand my weird Instagram performance art or they find my long captions annoying. That’s part of the package of being in the public eye, and honestly I find it exhilarating.

Performance art is really more of a command than an invitation.

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.

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.

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.’

It’s always been performance art, but now it’s on a different level.

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.

I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.

Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting.

My go-go dancing was not your typical go-go dancing: I really was doing performance art. I would do dramatic, elaborate lyricals across the bar. I learned a lot, actually, as an artist during that time.

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.

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.

I am thrilled Lady Gaga has helped to teach her audience about long durational work and performance art.

Compared to other forms of drama, performance art is often thought of as inaccessible and overly artsy. I prefer to think of it as storytelling, something that has been with us through the ages and a part of every culture.

I think I’m actually much too shy to do any performance art. I admire the big swings those guys take, but I’m not a one-man band.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That’s the difference between mere theater and performance art.

Professional wresting is like performance art. It truly is. You’re taking the crowd on a ride, on an emotional roller coaster.

I started using film as part of live theatre performance – what used to be called performance art – and I became intrigued by film.