Piper and Performances as Art.

In this week's chapter of The Nature of Art, we were told to read the segment on Adrian Piper and her unique views on art and fetishism. The Q&A question had us analyze and interpret Piper's perspective on performance art and why it was so unique from other art forms that we've studied in this class. Piper maintains that performance art is unique form other art forms because it is the only art form that the human being has an active role in; because of this, every human being is different, therefore every performance is different from the other based upon each performer's unique personality. Essentially, the performer himself or herself is art because they are the ones who make the performance what it is. There is a "social collaboration," according to Piper, between the performers and the audience which takes away the mysterious third party element of out-of-control interpretation, but still maintains the same basic contextual forms of art such as having a basis for interpretation, judgement, and analysis. Each performance is an unreproducible act that can never be repeated in the same exact way again.

My question is, "Do you think that the human form it in itself a form of art? Why or why not?"