Like the international avant-garde, rock-and-roll is the creative product of a rebellious youth culture trying to reach a mass aud...ience. Its artists embrace technological innovation. Their lives and personal styles are often counterculture. Many rock groups have appropriated creative strategies of modern art history: Some stage acts can be seen as Neo-Dada performance, others have lifted ideas from the Surrealists, the Situationists, and other art groups. Although pop music has its individual stars like Elvis and Madonna, most rock musicians, like the international avant-garde, work collaboratively, in bands. But however much a rock-and-roll group may initially appeal to a specific youth subculture, its potential for vast global audiences is different from that of fine art, which remains within the arcane reaches of high culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair--a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its pa...rts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art to me was a state, it didn't need to be an accomplishment. By any of the standards of production, achievement, performance, I ...was not an artist. But I always thought of myself as one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the pun...ishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue ...and the performance of virtuous actions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Theater of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the ...cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But they don't. The material of the scree...n is not actual objects but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects. For instance, on the stage the actor moves in real space and time. He cannot even cross the room without performing a definite number of movements. On the screen an action may be shown only in terminal points with all its intervening moments left out. Similarly, in watching a performance on the stage the spectator is governed by the actual conditions of space and time. Not so in the case of the movie spectator. Thanks to the moving camera he is able to view the scene from all kinds of angles, leaping from a long-distance view to a close-range inspection of every detail. It is obvious that with this extraordinary power of handling space and time--by elimination and emphasis, according to its dramatic needs--the motion picture can never be content with modeling itself after the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignobl...e to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Yuppies are not defectors from revolt, they are a new race, assured, amnestied, exculpated, moving with ease in the world of p...erformance, mentally indifferent to any objective other than that of change and advertising.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »