This past Saturday, Oscar winning actress Tilda Swinton, was spotted at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City performing her piece ‘The Maybe’ which involves sleeping in a glass box.
 
Swinton first performed the piece back in 1995 and according to MoMOA’s statement on ‘The Maybe’: ‘…There is no published schedule for it’s appearance, no artists statement released, no museum statement beyond this brief context. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves live in real-shared- time: now we see it, now we don’t’
 
Edgy, very edgy, to the point of surrealism…yet the artist screams at society while simultaneously enveloping in it, like a salty dolphin flipper. Yes, the artist has captured something here, but can we as a society see the genius? Are we prepared to swallow their ‘Milk of Magnesium’ antidote to the zeitgeist’s sour stomach?
 
Is anyone else waiting for want Fred Armisen’s hipster character from Portlandia to ride by and say “Sleeping in a box is OVER!”
 
I’ve heard ‘Performance art” described as some of the most trite and pretentious work out there. That it’s some avant-garde wannabe doing something mundane and calling it “art” because it’s being done for a “point” and sometimes they don’t even have a point and call that the reason.
 
Don’t take this the wrong way, there are pieces that are very interesting and moving performance art, Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” and Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” really bring the audience in and most people find them to be “art”. However, for every one of these, there are a hundred art school know it alls who think that throwing a tantrum is akin to making a statement. It’s unfortunate, really.
 
When you know Marina Abramovic’s work, you start to see a lot of performance art as crap. She was ahead of her time in the 1960’s and 70’s with it, and she still rocks at it now. The modern era of performance art doesn’t have the feeling or evoke any real message or dialogue like it used to. No, wait. Maybe It’s mostly derivative or an offshoot of what’s been done before tedious to the point of dreck. Or as David Bowie pointed out many years ago, not much new in the way of ideas has been expressed through “modern art” since about the 70s-80s (the 80s didn’t have much).
 
As for ‘The Maybe’, I think the idea of having a major celebrity walk in and perform an utterly absurb piece in the middle of one of the world’s most prestigious art museums, with no warning, preparation or publicity is exactly what the piece is about. The fact that she gets to do that because she was the ‘White Witch’ in the Narnia movies and won an Oscar a few years ago is a statement about just how perverse our culture has become when it comes to the whims of celebrity. And then to twist it on it’s head and say you can’t even celebrate my celebrity and promote this thing (which is pretty much why, in this day and age celebrities get to do sh!t like this)…It’s kind of genius.
 
Or maybe Warhol was right when he said ‘Art is what you can get away with’.
 
-Dagobot

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