Top 1200 Performance Art Quotes & Sayings

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head. Educated readers give themselves a good performance. Educated listeners compare performance with text and with other performances. Good poets use the full resources of language.

It's always weird when it comes to awards and awards season because how can you say that this performance is better than this performance? Art is so subjective.

The performance on the stage has its reasons in the performance induced in thousands of separate minds and this second performance is no less prodigious than the first.

I see a lot of similarity between Bengali and Malayalam films regarding the basic emotions, the craftsmanship, art and performance. I also feel both the industries are very true to their art and culture.

Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it's more casual but more interesting.

The apex of perfection in equestrian art is not an exhibition of a great deal of different airs and movements by the same horse, but rather the conservation of the horse's enjoyment, suppleness and finesse during the performance, which calls for comparison with the finest ballet, or performance of an orchestra, or seeing a play by Racine, so moving is the sight of perfectly unisoned movements.

I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.

Performance art is really more of a command than an invitation.

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.

Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.

I'm interested in confronting police brutality and police abuse of cracking down on street performers and street artists, but also in valorizing street art as legitimate performance within the artistic sphere, where it's so often conflated with pan-handling and begging and not "successful" art. I want to change laws around street performance.

Stand-up is probably the most solo performance in art.

Traditional performance reviews have passed their sell-by date. Big time. There's research showing that roughly two-thirds of performance appraisals have either no effect - or a negative effect! - on employee performance.

It's always been performance art, but now it's on a different level.

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting.

I don't think I gave a good enough performance to be nominated for it. I thought I gave a fine performance, but those things are supposed to be about giving an extraordinary performance.

We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that.

It is much more difficult to measure non-performance than performance. Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Non-performance can almost always be explained away

Teaching is performance art.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

It's impossible to say that live art enjoys any single status in the information age--there are versions of live art that are still primarily art-world phenomena, others that appeal to much broader audiences. The Burning Man festival is a case in point--an event featuring performance that is itself a performance, which partakes simultaneously of frontier mythology, a counter-cultural impulse, and popular cultural visibility.

[Washington, DC] feels like you're watching performance art. A lot of the time. I don't believe them, I don't believe what they say, I don't think they're being absolutely sincere. I think it's performance art. And most of them are bad actors.

Right now anything made for the iPad is like performance art. I'm not interested in performance art. Comics are too hard to make to be done for such a passing blip. When it stabilizes, I'll look at it.

Teaching is a performance art.

I realized [using my own voice] is what creates the performance in the performance art and that's what helps creates the distance for the viewers, like the distance that I get when I step back.

My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.

Live theater is an amorphous art, constantly shifting and evolving with every performance.

From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.

For me, the idea of curating can be expanded. Curating science, curating art, music and theater and performance and not only bring those things into art but bring art into those areas.

I am not really into paintings, to be honest, but for me, the art I love is when I see singers putting their heart into their song, actors giving the performance of their lives, and books and movies that make me feel something I never thought I could; there's art in everything as long as it's made with soul.

I've worked with actors before where I was like, this is not working, and then I've seen their work on the screen and I've been like, Wow, that was a really great performance. Because there are a lot of elements with film. It's not like stage. It's not a kind of performance art anymore; it's a highly tuned kind of collaboration - a symphony.

All the rich people collect traditional Chinese art. So it's very natural for Chinese families to still see art as the highest human performance and send their children to this field.

My father was a painter and an anarchist, always getting in trouble for his performance art.

No matter what you're doing, whether it's a makeup tutorial or an interview or a lip sync, performance is the essence of drag. It is gender performance. Being able to produce a performance is what a superstar has to do.

When we deal in generalities, we shall never succeed. When we deal in specifics, we shall rarely have a failure. When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of performance accelerates.

Right before I went to Pacifica, I had written and performed a one-woman show and I consider that to be my original art form. Spaulding Grey and Karen Finley and other spoken word artists and performance artists really very much interested me, that art form.

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling--these are the tools of the dancer.

Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.

'Billy on the Street' is a persona. It's crafted; it has writers. It's a mixture of performance art and comedy.

Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.

I made my performance debut in New York City downtown on the Lower East Side in college doing awkward performance art as a go-go dancer at Lady Starlight's Party. And I never thought that my love for mediocre performance art and bad mime would ever come to use in my career as an actor. But my fantasies came true and I got to play Maureen in Rent.

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

I'm extremely critical. I don't consider myself a performance artist. I balk at the term performance art.

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing.

I've realized that the only thing I'm interested in is the performance. If the performance is right, then I'm happy. You offer up the dialogue and then the performance comes around.

Just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art.

Much of the art of the 1960s, from body art to video and direct performance, was concerned with similar issues. And then there was media art, which made it possible to express things directly, without having to rely on the written word, which was manipulated by men.

I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art.

Everything that I spent my entire life dedicated to, which is this art of mentalism, of magic... I don't see it and feel it and experience it like I first did when I was getting involved in this art. I try to look at it as a spectator but unless I get amnesia I still can't overlook that. I can appreciate the performance but I would love to be fooled.

Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.

The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.

Politics with me isn't theater. It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.

I went to art school for fine art and then I started doing performance art, and then I started making fun of performance art, and it turned into comedy.

Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.

Performance became part of my art in a way - expressing things and emotion.

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

The greatest footballers take the sport into the world of art, of performance.