Comedy and Performance Art

Ken Johnson, who visited on November 7, interrogates the term "performance art" with regard to comedy in a piece that appeared last month in the New York Times.

"Comedy must at least be funny, and if it is not, it fails. Must comic performance art be funny? Can it be called art if it aims primarily for laughs? A lot of nonperformance art these days is humorous. Maurizio Cattelan’s work often is, and his retrospective at the Guggenheim, in which almost everything he’s done as an artist is suspended high above the rotunda floor, might be seen as a big joke." More.