Art Basel Turns Away Nude Performance Artist

Milo Moiré, a Swiss performance artist you may remember for creating a painting from paint-filled eggs she dropped out of her vagina outside Art Cologne, paid a visit to Art Basel in Basel on June 19. Or at least attempted to. After having her skin painted with the names of the articles of clothing she wasn’t wearing […]

Daily Pic: Tino Sehgal Has the Best Thing in Basel

At the giant Art Basel fair that opens tomorrow in Switzerland, the best thing to be seen has nothing to do with the thousands of deluxe art objects being offered on the sales floor. It sits in a building off to one side, where, as part of a performance-art project called “14 Rooms,” the brilliant artist Tino […]

Contemporary art isn’t original – even copying has been done before

The row around Marina Abramović is redundant, as the story of art is one of homages and remakes. But that’s not to say there isn’t a problem. “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso. Or at least he gets the credit for saying it. Perhaps he pinched the words from Oscar Wilde. For there […]

Naked Man Strikes Goddess Pose In Front Of Botticelli Painting

Museum-goers were treated to a shocking display at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery on Saturday when a visitor stripped naked before Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” As the naked man faced the Botticelli painting, he struck the same pose as the goddess depicted in the 15th-century work. He then scattered rose petals around himand took a knee in front of the famous […]

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opens Yoko Ono restrospective

Yoko Ono (B. 1933, Tokyo) has been recognized as one of the most outstanding avant-garde artists for over sixty years. She is a pioneer in many of the artistic fields to which she has dedicated her life, and is considered to be one of the precursors to conceptual art, film and performance art. She is […]

Carolee Schneemann: ‘I never thought I was shocking’

In 1968, Carolee Schneemann caused outrage in Britain simply by giving a talk about art. “I wore farmers overalls,” she says, “and I had lots of oranges stuffed everywhere. It was about Cézanne, so I showed slides and talked about his influence – and I kept undressing and dressing. I was naked under my overalls […]

Petr Pavlensky: why I nailed my scrotum to Red Square

On a snowless but chilly afternoon early in the Moscow winter, a 29-year-old man with a gaunt, emaciated face stepped on to the vast expanse of Red Square. He made his way to a spot on the cobblestones not far from the marble mausoleum housing the waxy corpse of Vladimir Lenin, and began to undress. In […]

First major Actionist show comes to Britain

Violent and sexual precursor to performance art is dramatically laid bare in new exhibition. Brus and his fellow Actionists, Otto Muhl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, have been explained away as the upshot of Austria’s failure to come to terms with Nazism, as an extreme manifestation of the sexual revolution, a logical extension of action […]

Unlock art: A lesson in performance art – video

Crotchless trousers, baths of excrement, John Cage, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic … in the first of a series of exclusive films with the Tate, in which stars give potted histories of art movements, Frank Skinner opens up the wild world of performance art.

The Stuff of Building and Destroying

‘Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,’ at the New Museum. “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum is a superb survey, but also a kind of transfiguration. It liberates the Los Angeles-based Mr. Burden from the clutches of history, expanding and rebalancing our understanding of his art.