The novelty of performance art: exploration in contemporary art in light of the social sciences

Abstract

This article presents performance art as an artistic making whose novelty lies in the specific way in which it is realized: through a flow of interactions between artists, audiences, producers, public policies and, especially, in non-traditional art spaces (streets, public spaces in general). The realization of the performance corresponds, in the article, to its sustaining in a duration as a live event. Photographic records of this process are part of the text. The empirical information was gathered during fieldwork in Bahia (Salvador, Lençóis and Porto Seguro) and Brasília. From the theoretical point of view, the argumentation is aligned with the new developments in the sociology of art, which shows insufficiencies in relation to the object treated, which led the research to thoughts from outside the area, in sociology itself, in anthropology and in philosophy, in what the latter has recently offered as resources to the social sciences.