Between 1900 and 2000, performance art evolved from a fringe practice to a global divertissement. Its history divides into two periods: the first half of the 20th century, when performative practices by the avant-garde weren’t formally categorized as art, and the postwar era, when they eventually were. Moreover, these activities were confined largely to Europe and America before spreading worldwide after 1950.

Performance before and after midcentury was also distinguished by its increasing reliance on the camera, first for documentation, and later as an element integral to the work. The genre became increasingly bound up with photography, film, and video, which transformed a transitory medium into an art object after the fact.

Moreover, by the 1990s, film and video had achieved production values commensurate with mainstream movies, which had the effect of turning performance art into another form of cinematic mise-en-scène disconnected from live action in front of an audience.

The most salient development for performance art after 1950, though, was the sheer number of artists who embraced it. What follows, then, is a necessarily abridged account of this fascinating chapter in art history.

Read “The ARTnews Guide to Performance Art, Part One: 1700s–1920s” here.

Our end of season predictions are HERE! Jules, Vish, Pete and Jim reveal who they picked way back in August last year and there are - quite frankly - some absolute rotters in there.

We also discuss Man City’s plans to build a tunnel to London for Declan Rice, while across the city Adrien Rabiot’s mum holds the entire Manchester United board hostage. Plus, Pete has an idea for a quite inappropriate new TV show and Jules gives you a song to send you into the weekend! Breaking news: it’s not Pit and Bull.

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The Headlines

SETTLING HIS AFFAIRS. The estate of the late antiquities dealer Douglas A.J. Latchford has agreed to forfeit $12 million in a deal with U.S. officials, who claimed in a civil case that Latchford trafficked in looted Cambodian artifacts, the New York Times reports. Latchford was criminally charged in 2019 with dealing stolen material, but died the next year at the age of 88, before any trial. Since then, Latchford’s daughter and heir, Julia Copleston, has been repatriating scores of artifacts that the Cambodian government has said were illegally taken out of the country. The deal also calls for the estate to surrender a seventh-century bronze statue from Vietnam that was improperly obtained. In a statement quoted by Bloomberg, an agent with Homeland Security Investigations termed Latchford “a prolific dealer of stolen antiquities.”

THE STAR TREATMENT. September will see the release of Dumb Money, a film version of Ben Mezrich’s eponymous book about the mayhem around GameStop in 2021, and art types might want to consider booking a ticket. During that episode, retail traders poured money into the videogame seller’s stock, inflicting pain on firms that were shorting it. As some many recall, a couple art-collecting hedge-funders were involved in the affair, Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen, who provided financing for an embattled colleague, and so the big question is . . . who will play them in the movie? Bloomberg’s Katia Porzecanski has the details.Cohen will be played by Vincent D’Onofrio, of Law & Order fame, and Griffin by Nick Offerman, of Parks and Recreation. And yes, the script apparently features Cohen sitting near his famous Damien Hirst shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), as the action unfolds.

The Digest

As a Black teenager growing up in Wilson, North Carolina, in the 1950s, Milton “Toby” Fitch Jr. wanted to swim in the Olympic-sized pool on the prosperous East side of town—a pool that only white people could use. Like so many places in the Jim Crow South, Wilson, a tobacco town of roughly 50,000 people one hour east of Raleigh, was heavily segregated; one study described it as two cities divided by a railroad track. One day, Fitch—whose father was the first Black mail carrier in Wilson and the North Carolina coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference—snuck in through the men’s showers and jumped in the pool. The police escorted him out and the city drained the water. “All the young kids were mad as hell at me,” he recalls.

In 1965, the monumental Voting Rights Act passed, striking down the suppressive devices that prevented African-Americans from voting in the South for so many years. At the time, one in four North Carolinians were Black but there wasn’t a single Black member in the state legislature. When Fitch tried to register to vote after the law’s approval, an election official threatened to make him recite the Declaration of Independence, an example of one of the many ways Southern white officials kept Blacks from voting. Fitch protested and succeeded in registering. “I realized and understood early on in life what people were able to achieve when they participated in the process,” Fitch tells me.

After becoming a civil rights lawyer in 1975, Fitch filed a range of lawsuits to desegregate schools, workplaces, and all levels of government in North Carolina. The latter effort finally bore fruit in the early 1980s when the courts ordered the state to create new legislative districts that would give Black voters the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Fitch joined the state house in 1985 and rose through the ranks, becoming the state’s first Black House Majority Leader and chair of the redistricting committee. He drew the map that led to the election of North Carolina’s first Black member of Congress since Reconstruction. After 16 years in the state house, he served as a state judge for 17 years, then rejoined the legislature as a member of the state senate in 2018. 

Like so many prominent Black lawmakers, Fitch owed his political career to the Voting Rights Act. But last year, he became one of the victims of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the law. North Carolina Republicans passed a redistricting map in 2021 that took away two counties in his district carried by Joe Biden and added two counties carried by Donald Trump, reducing the number of Black voters from 48 percent to 35 percent. This meant that a once-secure Democratic seat shifted eleven points to the right, and Fitch lost handily to a white Republican. In total, seven Black members—a fifth of the state legislature’s Black caucus—lost their seats in 2022, leading to a stunning decline in minority representation in a state that had been regarded as one of the most integrated in the South.

The main reason that Republicans were able to target Black representation so ruthlessly was because of Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 Supreme Court ruling holding that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve voting changes and electoral maps with the federal government—a process known as “preclearance.” June 25th marks the 10th anniversary of the decision, which has had a devastating impact on voting rights in the South. Shelby County laid the groundwork for a wave of new voter suppression laws and racially gerrymandered maps. Decades of advances for minority voters have been wiped out in the past ten years.

Some of you have powerful memories of Daniel Ellsberg. You remember the incredible impact he had on the way Americans thought about the war in Vietnam when he leaked the Pentagon Papers back in 1971. My memory is different. It’s from just four weeks ago, when—in hospice care, knowing he had only weeks to live—he comforted a young whistleblower who’d come to conclude her act was pointless. You could have heard a pin drop, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that moment since I learned of Ellsberg’s death last Friday.

Ellsberg was a speaker at a conference, the Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting, at the University of California, Berkeley. (You can watch the whole thing here.) He towered over the room on a giant Zoom screen, calling in from his home just a couple of miles away. On another screen was Reality Winner, who, as a twenty-something National Security Agency translator, leaked classified documents about Russian interference in the US election, and was sentenced to prison time for it. Now out and barred from traveling without the government’s permission, she sat in her living room in Corpus Christi, Texas, wearing a T-shirt that read “Grow Food, Love Hard,” and a weary expression.

It was clear from the outset that this was not the kind of panel where journalists congratulate each other for the great work they do. Ellsberg started it off noting, with a smile, that “I have yet to meet a whistleblower who has a good feeling about the newspaper they dealt with, or the reporter they dealt with.” Boom.

In Ellsberg’s case, the reporter he dealt with was Neil Sheehan, the New York Times reporter also famous for his history of the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie. Sheehan and the Times won a Pulitzer for their coverage and for standing up to the Nixon administration, which went to court to stop them from publishing the documents. (My colleague David Corn remembers the episode, and how it changed his life, here.)

Ellsberg was not a beneficiary of the Times’ legal gumption. He faced charges under the Espionage Act by himself, though he eventually beat them. And it was eventually revealed that Sheehan had seriously betrayed Ellsberg’s confidence: Ellsberg told him he could read but not copy the documents, but let him have a key to his apartment. Sheehan used that to secretly copy the papers. As publication approached, Ellsberg pleaded with Sheehan to give him a bit of advance notice so he could take precautions. Sheehan never returned his calls.

How the Cuban Missile Crisis inspired It's a Small World

Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious sanctuary in the central Netherlands made of burial mounds and ancient offerings of human and animal bones that has striking similarities to Stonehenge.

The 4,000-year-old site was discovered in the town of Tiel and, like prehistoric stone circle Stonehenge, tracked the position of the sun on the solstices.

“The largest mound served as a sun calendar, similar to the famous stones of Stonehenge in England,” the municipality of Tiel said in a statement. “This sanctuary must have been a highly significant place where people kept track of special days in the year, performed rituals and buried their dead. Rows of poles stood along pathways used for processions.”

The site previously yielded significant archaeological finds. In 2017 excavators unearthed several graves, one of which held the remains of a woman buried with a glass bead from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). It was the oldest bead ever found in the Netherlands and finally proved that the region was, to some degree, in contact with far-flung civilizations.

A selection of the discoveries from the site will be exhibited in a local Tiel museum and in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.

Henry Shum paints under dim overhead light in his childhood bedroom. His parents’ home, where he started painting at age 14, is in the eastern New Territories of Hong Kong. He left the island for a few years to study at the Chelsea College of Arts in London, then returned in 2020 as the pandemic broke out. Given the subdued radiance of his paintings, the poorly lit studio is surprising. But Shum likes it this way, reasoning that “if you can see the painting well in a harsh environment, then in a setting where the light is proper and the wall is clean, it should look good.”

Shum always intended to move back to Hong Kong, mostly because his family is there. It helped that he was offered a debut solo show from Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery after a representative saw his thesis work. During a series of strict lockdowns over the last three years, Shum developed a distinctive working process. He begins by laying down thin layers of primer. As those layers build up, they invite a certain unpredictability to the surface. Suffused with lapis atmospheres and often accented with scarlet or chlorophyll green, his paintings feature silhouettes that appear to liquify into their surroundings; oil paint appears to bleed like watercolors. In Dream Construction (2020), two glowing cyan figures perch in front of an amber anthropomorphic fire. The surface is finished with a dry brush, which gives the faces a dusted quality.

Despite his clear skill, Shum believes the best paintings are out of his control; they have “a mystery that allows you to go in, discover, maybe reveal the painting.” Painting, he said, is “about not knowing what you’re doing. It’s about allowing the process to take over. It’s a constant exploration in the dark.” Because of lockdown, Shum lived with those paintings for an unusual length of time. “Sometimes it’s very painful, living with your work,” he told me. “It means that you’re thinking about it all the time.” The paintings appeared in a solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York this past November.

Lately, Shum has been experimenting with various finishes, combining dull and glossy surfaces on the same canvas. A new painting depicts one figure leading another through a marshy grove. Only from a certain angle can one see that two bands of unprimed canvas runs across the composition. There, the landscape appears gently interrupted, at once more saturated and palpable. But the ground they stand on is laid in dry, disassembling swaths, as if the whole scene is still a landscape of the mind.

It’s our first OTC Transfer Special of the summer! Dotun, Andy and wrongly-suspected Geordie David Cartlidge get under the skin of Europe’s biggest transfer stories right now.

Andy explains why England’s brave boy Kyle Walker will fare well at Bayern Munich – but do they really need him? We also discuss how Dortmund can *maybe* replace Bellingham and ask who the ‘domino’ transfer will be this summer! Plus, listen out for Dotun’s grave error…

We'll be back with another OTC Transfer Special next week. Got a question for us? Ask away! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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The Sex and the City sequel is 'still annoying'