Artists Unite Issue

Artist Peter Walsh is a writing fellow for Performa ‘09. He just let me know about the project Scoring Performa, which has a number of writers, well, scoring the annual performance art festival. The resulting document is a wide variety of takes on what the assessment of art can be: critique, summary, reaction, etc.

From Peter’s own post (an excerpt):

“Some Notes on Liveness: Part One”

By PETER WALSH

I’m addicted to the privilege of “being there.” In a society where the eyewitness testimony of one person can put another person behind bars – or set them free, it’s hard not to be. We honor the power of the witness. As a sensing person, my being shaped by a constant bodily flow of information, I prefer, for example, a well-made meal to simple calories. I also prefer theater to cinema, a big movie premiere to stuttering YouTube videos, the passion of a lover to the secondhand “sexiness” of pop culture….