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Fake Performance Artists
Prank Tate Modern


February 4, 2013 | Marina Galperina

Groan.

THAT IS NOT ART.

But look at those visitors of Tate Modern and the Saatichi Gallery, look at ’em taking photos and videos of the awkardly posed duo Doug and Mikael holding ping-pongs in their mouths. They fell for it. Because… I don’t know… because Marina Abramović?

If this was performance art, it would have been bad art — because this means nothing and stirs no emotions and has zero aesthetic appeal — but it is not performance art. It’s a joke, because ha-ha someone doing something weird is obviously performance art. Funny, right? NO. That is not to say there isn’t a lot of bad, stupid art out there, but this prank is coming from the same cannon of thought that I am addressing when I say that you can’t punch a Yellowist or drunkenly attack people in the street and call it performance art.

Alright. You had a good laugh. Now move on and let some other people do museum intervention better. At least the activists from Liberate Tate had flair and environmental motive. At least when a regular person responded to the Smithsonian censoring David Wojnarowicz’s Fire in the Belly by screening it  on an iPad swinging from his neck until he was kicked out, he was doing it for a reason. And fuck it, at least when Banksy hung his work at the Guggenheim, he actually had work to hang!

This is not art. I’m bored. Why did I write this? I’m not angry anymore. Whatever. Art. Pffft.