Is performance art really art at all We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question.
The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of "The Republic." There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations—by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls "ideas," the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only knows how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter"s knowledge is higher than the artist"s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist"s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances.
This famous design of the universe and its degrees of reality was clearly constructed to put art in its place—the domain of illusions, shadows, dreams. The artist is cognitively useless. It explains why philosophers tend to have little use for art. Several of Plato"s dialogues stress the inferiority of art. The political message of "The Republic" is that philosophers, at home in the realm of ideas, should be kings. Artists don"t even belong in the Republic!
Meanwhile, the mimetic theory, as it is called, had a certain power. Aristotle, in his "Poetics," characterizes plays and epics as imitations of actions, such as the death of Hektor. But a performance is not the imitation of an action, but the action itself. It is art and reality in one.
In the 1960s, a group of philosophers argued that art was indefinable, so many things are classified as art that the most one could hope for is what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance." Yet not having a definition does not stand in the way of our picking out the art works from a pile of assorted things. A definition will make us none the wiser. Unfortunately, the philosophers who subscribed to this view were out of touch with the avant garde. Between 1913 and 1917, Duchamp presented a number of readymades, most famously his "Fountain," a toilet bowl. In 1964, Andy Warhol exhibited wooden facsimiles of shipping cartons. A work of art and a mere shipping carton can look exactly alike. What explains the difference What is the difference between sitting down with someone in a performance and merely sitting down with someone The work of art has meaning; it is about something. And it embodies that meaning. The passage aims to ______.