The ephemeral on display: When performance becomes collection
Imagine an autumn evening in New York, 1974. In a SoHo gallery with flaking white walls, a woman in a wedding dress stained with mud and blood stands motionless before a table covered in knives. For six hours, Marina Abramović lets the public do as they please with the objects laid out before her: a rose, a loaded pistol, a razor blade. No one dares pull the trigger, but several visitors cut her skin. At the end of the performance, the artist, disheveled, stands and walks toward the audience with open arms. The spectators step back, frightened by what they have just done—or failed to do. Today, if you enter the office of a seasoned collector, you might come across a relic from that evening: a signed black-and-white photograph, a knife with dried blood under glass, or even a looping video of the artist’s face, serene and defiant at once. But what do you really own when you buy these traces? A fragment of history, a concept, or merely the illusion of capturing the moment?
By Artedusa
••9 min readPerformance, by nature, is an art of the present, a breath that vanishes the moment it is released. Yet since the 1960s, collectors, museums, and gallerists have tried to tame this ephemeral, to turn it into something tangible, into market value. Between sacred relics, self-executable instructions, and digital archives, the performance market raises a dizzying question: can you truly own what, by definition, belongs to no one?
01Relics: when the object becomes fetish
Take Piero Manzoni’s Shit Paintings, those tin cans labeled Merda d’artista, sold by the weight of their supposed contents—though no one knows what’s inside, and no one dares open them. Or Andy Warhol’s Piss Paintings, canvases on which the artist urinated, letting the copper oxidize into abstract patterns. These works play with the idea of bodily traces, turning a trivial gesture into a collectible object. But what, exactly, is being collected? The concept, of course, but also the materiality of the medium: the metal box, the oxidized canvas, the signed label.
In performance, relics take even more surprising forms. The clippings of Joseph Beuys’s hair from his actions, the clothes Yoko Ono wore during Cut Piece (where the audience was invited to cut away her garments), or the cigarette butts crushed by Yves Klein during his Anthropométries—where nude models, coated in blue paint, pressed themselves onto canvases. These objects, often modest, acquire an outsized symbolic value. A New York collector owns a pair of Beuys’s worn shoes, worn during a performance where the artist explained art to a dead hare. “It’s not the shoe that matters, but the step it took,” he murmurs, stroking the cracked leather. Yet it is the shoe he bought, and it is the shoe that sits in his display case, like a pagan relic.
02Instructions: art as a score to play
What if, instead of buying an object, you bought an idea? That’s the gamble of Fluxus’s event scores, those minimalist instructions that turn the everyday into performance. “Open a window and listen to the street sounds for five minutes,” proposes Yoko Ono in Grapefruit, her manifesto-book. “Make a hole in your umbrella and go out in the rain,” suggests George Brecht. These works are not objects but protocols, invitations to act. A collector can acquire a signed typewritten sheet or a limited edition of the book, but the work itself only comes to life when executed.
Take Vito Acconci’s Following Piece: for a month in 1969, the artist followed strangers through New York’s streets until they entered a private space. Today, you can buy the certificate of authenticity for this performance—but also, and this is where things get interesting, the permission to reinterpret it. Some contemporary artists, like Tino Sehgal, push the concept even further: his works, such as This Progress (2010), where performers engage visitors in philosophical conversations, leave no material trace. The sales contract simply stipulates that the buyer agrees to present the work according to strict rules, with no recording or documentation. “You own the experience, not the object,” explains a Berlin gallerist. “It’s like buying a symphony: you don’t own the notes, but the right to have them played.”
03Archives: the ghost of performance
In a climate-controlled warehouse near Basel, thousands of cardboard boxes hold the archives of performance. Yellowed photographs, VHS tapes, notebooks, subway tickets used during an action—these documents, often overlooked at the time, have become collectible pieces in their own right. The market has seized upon these traces with voracity: a signed and numbered photograph of Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present can sell for tens of thousands of euros. Yet these images are only fragments, shards of memory. “A photograph of a performance is like a photograph of fireworks,” confides a MoMA curator. “It captures the light, but not the emotion.”
Some artists anticipated this drift. In 1971, Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm for Shoot. The performance, filmed in Super 8, lasted only a few seconds. Today, the original video is held in a private collection, but Burden always refused to commercialize it. “The work is the act, not its recording,” he declared. Yet collectors continue to hunt these audiovisual relics, like ghost hunters. A Parisian gallerist recounts selling an audio cassette of Seedbed (1972), where Vito Acconci masturbated under a gallery ramp, whispering fantasies to visitors. “The buyer never listened to the tape. He keeps it in a safe, like a talisman.”
04The body as medium: when the artist becomes the work
What if the work was the artist? That’s the radical proposition of some performers, who turn their own bodies into the medium. In 1997, Chinese artist Zhang Huan covered himself in honey and fish before lying in a Beijing public toilet, letting flies swarm over him. Today, collectors own samples of his dried blood, taken during other performances. Even more unsettling: in 2008, Serbian artist Marina Abramović offered her admirers the chance to become her “living archives” by recreating her historic performances. For a few thousand euros, you could “buy” the right to sit silently across from her for an hour, as in The Artist Is Present. “This isn’t a transaction, it’s a transmission,” she explains. Yet the market seized on the idea: certificates of authenticity were issued for these “reperformances,” turning an intimate experience into a speculative object.
Others go even further. In 2014, American artist Jordan Wolfson created Real Violence, a virtual reality video where the viewer witnesses an ultra-realistic beating. The work, sold as a VR headset and certificate, raises an unsettling question: can you own a traumatic experience? “It’s like buying a nightmare,” murmurs a collector who acquired the piece. “But it’s my nightmare now.”
05The market and its paradoxes: when the ephemeral gains value
The paradox is this: the more ephemeral a performance, the more valuable its traces become. A preparatory drawing by Joseph Beuys for a 1960s action can sell for hundreds of thousands of euros, though the action itself lasted only a few hours. Collectors hunt for “secondary relics”: tickets to historic performances, letters between artists, sketches scribbled on napkins. “It’s like collecting the ashes of a campfire,” chuckles a London gallerist. “You know the fire’s out, but you want to keep a little of its warmth.”
Yet this market remains fragile. In 2019, a Christie’s auction offered a “work” by Tino Sehgal: a performance to be executed in the buyer’s home. The lot sold for $150,000, but no one really knows what was purchased. “It’s like buying a promise,” explains an expert. “A promise that can evaporate at any moment.” Other artists refuse outright to commercialize their performances. In 2012, American artist Paul McCarthy destroyed all the videos of his 1970s actions, leaving only written descriptions. “Performance art must stay alive, or die,” he declared.
06Collecting the invisible: a new frontier
So what’s left to collect when the work itself has vanished? Perhaps the most radical idea: owning what does not exist. In 2021, Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan sold Comedian, a banana taped to a wall, for $120,000. The work consisted of a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions—the banana itself had to be replaced regularly. “It’s the logical endpoint of contemporary art,” quips a critic. “You buy an instruction manual, and that’s it.”
Others explore even more immaterial paths. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sold Infinity Rooms as NFTs, allowing collectors to “own” a visual experience without ever possessing its materiality. “It’s like buying a dream,” explains a buyer. “You can’t touch it, but you know it’s yours.” Some artists go so far as to sell “ghost performances”: works that never took place, but whose idea is recorded in a contract. “You own the right to imagine them,” sums up a gallerist. “And sometimes, that’s all that matters.”
07The legacy: what remains when everything has disappeared
At heart, collecting performance art is collecting memories. Memories that don’t really belong to you, but that you can touch, like brushing a scar. In a Paris apartment in the Marais, a collector has turned a room into a performance sanctuary: a chair used in The Artist Is Present, a shirt stained with Yves Klein’s paint, a looping video of Chris Burden getting shot. “I don’t own these works,” he admits, stroking Abramović’s chair. “I own their shadow.”
Perhaps that’s the answer to the initial question: you don’t collect the performance, you collect its absence. Like Manzoni’s tin cans, which may contain nothing but are worth fortunes because they promise a mystery. Or like Fluxus’s instructions, which only come to life if someone executes them. “Performance art is like love,” murmurs a curator at the Centre Pompidou. “You can’t keep it in a box. But you can keep its trace, and that’s already a lot.”
So the next time you encounter a performance relic in a gallery, ask yourself: what do you really see? An object, an idea, or just the reflection of your own desire to possess the impossible?