In many ways, the history of art has been a steady progression towards this irresistible moment in time, which has witnessed the lines formerly separating performance and life become increasingly blurred. At the forefront of this phenomenon are videoblogs, which refuse to make any distinction between the two, seemingly signaling the inevitable destiny of performance art as the complete fusion of these two formerly separate spheres.
"Really?"
One of the central paradigms governing the history of Western Art since the Classical Period has been the division between the Real and the Ideal, as generally expressed by the ancient Greek Philosophers Aristotle and Plato, respectively. Whereas Platonism, in its various and sundry manifestations throughout the centuries, sees the sensual world as a paltry reflection of an Ideal world of Forms, Aristotelians maintain that the physical world is the only one in existence and, thus, the only one worth contemplating. For over two millennia, Realism and Idealism were the dominant manners in European aesthetics, passing through several seemingly disparate but ultimately related incarnations: the former in both the Greek and Roman Decadence, the Baroque Period and the Naturalism of the mid-19th Century, and the latter in Greek and Roman Classicism, Byzantine and Medieval Christian Art, the Renaissance, Neoclassicism and again, though barely recognizable in philosophy and form, in Romanticism and the Decadence of the fin de siecle. But with the advent of photography and film, Realism in art seemed to lose its raison d’être, as these new representational mediums could render the visible world more accurately than any painter or sculptor ever dreamed.
In Hegelian terms, it would seem that these technological innovations would enable Platonic Idealism to finally assert itself as the victorious antithesis to Aristotelian Realism’s deposed thesis. But then Modernism appeared in the 20th Century to overturn this binary model, which had governed Western Art throughout its recorded history, by proposing a “pure plastic art” that aspired toward a new kind of Realism that would produce “a total integration of art and life” (Kleiner 780). As expressed by Piet Mondrian, a representative of De Stijl Movement (one of several manifestations of this aesthetic paradigm shift), life and art were no longer separate domains and, therefore, “the idea of art as an illusion separate from real life must disappear” (Kleiner 780). Building on the efforts made by Impressionists (who painted light instead of form) and Cubists (who depicted natural forms with geometrical shapes seen from multiple angles) to move beyond traditional modes of representation, many Abstract artists begin to look at life itself as art, not merely as its inspiration. From Marcel Duchamp’s found art to Man Ray’s avant-garde collages and conceptual photography, man and art were quickly dissolving into one another like never before. These theoretical developments also inspired a new kind of radically political photojournalism, which in turn led many filmmakers to combine a documentary aesthetic with the acute social consciousness of 19th Century Naturalism to produce films about the daily struggles of ordinary people (e.g. Italian Neorealism and Cinéma Vérité).
Art.
But the apotheosis of this kind of artistic subjectivity came into being in the 1960’s with the arrival of Andy Warhol’s unique creative vision and the rise of Pop Art. Though his artistic philosophy manifested itself in numerous ways, we will focus here on Warhol’s prediction that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” (Kaplan 758), which he saw as the unavoidable result of modern advances in media dissemination and forms and the rise of popular culture that his work helped to enshrine, and how this idea paved the way for today’s videoblogs. Warhol’s work and lifestyle, which were inseparable, proved the truth of this statement in a variety of ways, two of which we will demonstrate here. The Factory (the name of his successive multidisciplinary studios) was always filled with Warhol’s “Superstars,” the often untalented hangers-on that compromised much of his social and creative circle, who became famous simply for being at The Factory and associating with the artist. This phenomenon was captured and confirmed by Warhol’s literary expression of the Pop Art aesthetic, a, A Novel, an exact transcription of several conversations between the “superstars” and a response to James Joyce’s Modernist masterpiece Ulysses that further cemented the fame of the Factory milieu. Though some critics bewailed Warhol’s alleged superficiality and commerciality, most have come to see him as “the most brilliant mirror of our times,” an artist that “captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of [modern] American culture” (Lando 1).
lucky guess.
Reflecting on the media-saturated pop culture of 1970’s America, Warhol could already say “my prediction from the sixties finally came true” (Kaplan 758). Although the intellectual restlessness of the notoriously protean artist would later cause him to change his famous statement to “in the future 15 people will be famous” and “in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous” in order to confuse and mystify people, his prediction retains its prescience to this day (Murphy 1). Just as his own MTV television program Any Warhol’s 15 minutes led to videoblog precursors like the Real world and the explosion of reality television in the last decade, his enduring legacy continues to be reflected in New Media forms like “youtube” and other websites that solicit and present user-generated material. These venues have made it easier than ever for regular people to get their 15 minutes of fame, causing some contemporary artists like the Scottish singer-songwriter Momus to joke that “on the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people” (Momus 1). As the epitome of aesthetic, if not necessarily artistic, Realism, the ascendance of the videoblog can be seen as the ultimate victory of the Aristotelian worldview in the realm of performance art.
