Book: APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART
What are we to make of Liberace?
Was he a ‘performance artist’?
You don’t have to be a fan of high camp megastar Liberace to appreciate how illustrative he can be when it comes to the thorny question of the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. Were he still alive, and if he could be bothered with any of the issues raised here, I’m sure he would say ‘You’ve got me completely wrong, I’m not trying to be transgressive — I’m a normal artiste — and to be honest I don’t know the point you’re trying to make.’
This article is following in the footsteps of an earlier intervention placing David Icke in the realms of performance art, despite the fact that Icke himself would see this kind of ‘repositioning’ as an illegitimate attempt to dismiss his core message — what is that message, exactly? — by deliberately misinterpreting it as well as failing — in the worst possible way — to take it seriously. Now to achieve this repositioning of Icke we needed to approach the entirety of the Icke phenomenon as a form of recreational theatre, and therefore as spectacle; so still not disregarding anything we might find there, but savouring its nonsensicality rather than the conspiratorial call to action. Art is, after all, strictly presentational and recreational, and although there are artists who like to blur…
