Performance Theory: Reconceptualizing Art as Action

When you walk into an art gallery, what exactly are you looking at? The conventional answer seems obvious: a painting, a sculpture, a photograph – a thing. But what if that framing is philosophically incomplete? What if the painting on the wall is not the artwork itself, but merely the residue of one – a trace left behind by the real event, which was the act of making it? This is precisely the provocation at the heart of the Performance Theory of Art. Far from being a niche position, it represents a fundamental challenge to how we understand what art is, where it resides, and how it ought to be appreciated.

The common-sense view and its limitations 🔗

For most of art history, the dominant view has been what philosophers sometimes call the common-sense theory of art: the artwork is an object – physical, stable, and directly perceptible. You appreciate a Rembrandt by standing before the canvas; you experience a symphony by hearing the sounds produced in a concert hall. On this view, the finished product is the artwork. The creative process that led to it may be interesting, even inspiring, but it is ultimately separate from the work itself.

This view has real intuitive force, but it runs into difficulty once you start pressing it. Consider two paintings that are visually identical in every perceptual detail – same colors, same brushstrokes, same dimensions. Are they the same artwork? Most people would say no, especially if one was created by Vermeer in the seventeenth century and the other is a contemporary forgery. But if the artwork just is the physical object, what exactly makes them different? The common-sense theory struggles to answer this. It is precisely this kind of puzzle that motivates the Performance Theory of Art.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, central questions in the ontology of art include: what sort of things are works of art, how are they individuated, and what is their relation to their physical manifestations? These are not merely technical philosophical questions – they bear directly on how we value, interpret, and preserve art.

David Davies and art as performance 🔗

The most systematic and influential defense of the Performance Theory comes from the philosopher David Davies, whose landmark 2004 book Art as Performance (Wiley-Blackwell) laid out the theory’s full scope. Davies’s central claim is bold: artworks are not objects produced by performances – they are performances. The act of creation is not a means to an end. It is the artwork itself.

As described in Davies’s framework, the ontological shift is significant – art moves from being a product of the artist’s performance to being an actual performance in its own right. The physical object – the canvas, the score, the printed text – becomes the completion of the performance rather than the artwork as such. This is a radical departure from the common-sense view, where the object is simply a generative product.

Davies builds his theory to accommodate the full range of artistic media. He considers painting, music, literature, film, performance, and dance – mounting a case that across all these forms, what we properly appreciate when we engage with art is the generative action behind it: the artist’s decisions, intentions, manipulations of a medium, and responses to the conditions of creation. In this sense, every artwork – even a painting hanging silently in a museum – is, at its core, a performance.

The generative process as the artwork 🔗

The concept of the generative process is central to understanding Davies’s theory. To appreciate an artwork, on his account, is not simply to have an unmediated perceptual encounter with a physical object. It is to engage with the entire network of actions, choices, and conditions through which the work came into being.

Think of a painter at work. The sequence of brushstrokes, the decision to rework a section, the choice of a particular pigment at a particular moment – these are not incidental details. They are constitutive of what the artwork is. When you learn that Picasso painted Guernica in a burst of furious energy over several weeks in response to the bombing of a Basque town, this knowledge changes what you are engaging with aesthetically. It is not mere background information. It bears on the identity of the work itself.

This is why, under the performance theory, two visually identical paintings can be different artworks. The generative performances that produced them are distinct – different actions, different intentions, different contexts – and it is those performances, not the surfaces they leave behind, that are the artworks. As one analysis of Davies’s argument puts it, the work of art is viewed not as a product of an artist’s creativity but as a process completed by the product.

Collingwood’s earlier contribution 🔗

Davies did not arrive at this position in isolation. An important intellectual predecessor is the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood, whose 1938 work The Principles of Art argued that art is fundamentally an activity, not an object. For Collingwood, art is fundamentally expression – a process through which the artist and the audience jointly come to realize and know certain mental states. The artwork is not the physical thing; it is the expressive activity that the physical thing mediates.

Davies, in his 2008 paper “Collingwood’s ‘Performance’ Theory of Art” published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, explicitly develops this Collingwoodian thread, arguing that for Collingwood, the work of art is an activity, not the product of an activity. Davies endorses this core insight while refining it into a more rigorous ontological framework suited to contemporary philosophy of art.

Importantly, Collingwood also argued that art is always collaborative. The artist never works alone – in the performing arts especially, other players have an essential role, and the so-called “cult of individual genius” is, in his view, entirely misplaced. This collaborative dimension feeds naturally into the performance theory’s broader implications for how we understand authorship and appreciation.

What does it mean to appreciate art as performance? 🔗

If artworks are performances, aesthetic appreciation must change accordingly. It can no longer be a matter of simply standing before an object and registering its perceptual qualities. To genuinely appreciate a work is to engage with the act behind it – to understand the choices made, the constraints navigated, the medium manipulated, and the context inhabited by the artist.

This has a direct bearing on how we approach art criticism and interpretation. A critic who evaluates only the visual surface of a canvas – ignoring the historical moment, the artist’s intentions, and the decisions embedded in the work’s making – is, on Davies’s account, missing the point. Appreciation must be appreciation of a performance, which means it must be informed appreciation, attentive to what the generative process actually involved.

This also reframes the role of the audience. Davies’s framework takes in key components of artistic performance – improvisation, rehearsal, the role of the audience, the embodied nature of the performer – and shows how each bears on the identity and appreciation of artworks. The audience is not a passive receiver of a finished product. In many forms of art, particularly theater and music, the audience’s presence and response are themselves part of what the performance is.

The theory’s scope: from painting to performance art 🔗

One of the strengths of Davies’s theory is its breadth. It is not a theory designed only for the explicitly time-based arts – theater, dance, music – where the idea of art as performance might seem obvious. It is designed to cover all art forms, including painting and sculpture, which have traditionally been understood as static object-based arts.

This is philosophically ambitious, and it forces some counter-intuitive conclusions. The Mona Lisa is not, strictly speaking, the artwork – Leonardo’s act of making it is. The canvas is what remains after the performance; it is the most tangible evidence of the work, but it is not the work itself. Davies’s book elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework that reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art, and between different artistic disciplines – precisely because the performance theory applies consistently across both.

For contemporary and installation art, the theory feels especially apt. Works by artists like Marina Abramović, where the artist’s body and presence are the medium, or conceptual works where the idea and its execution are inseparable, fit naturally within a performance-centered ontology. Performance art raises new issues of ontology, meaning, and taste, and expands the parameters of artistic expression in ways that object-centered theories cannot easily accommodate.

Objections and ongoing debates 🔗

The Performance Theory is not without its critics. One recurring objection is that it risks making artworks too ephemeral or inaccessible. If the artwork is the generative performance, what is left for audiences who encounter the work long after the artist is dead? Can a viewer today genuinely engage with Vermeer’s performance, or only with its physical residue?

Davies’s response is that to engage with the physical object correctly – in the right context, with appropriate knowledge of the medium, the tradition, and the artist’s decisions – just is to engage with the performance. The object serves as evidence for and access to the performance; it is not the performance itself, but it is the primary means by which audiences can reconstruct and appreciate it.

A further critique concerns the coherence of applying performance language to static arts. Critics have noted that Davies’s philosophical style, while effective in analytic philosophy, can become too abstract – theorizing about artworks in ways that drift from the actual experience people have when they encounter them. Aesthetics, on this view, must maintain some connection to the material presence of the artwork, even if that presence is not the whole story.

There is also the question of how the theory handles forgery, reproduction, and digital art. If the performance is what matters, a digitally reproduced image has a different generative history than the original – but audiences encountering both may have virtually identical perceptual experiences. The Performance Theory insists those are different artworks; whether that conclusion aligns with our actual aesthetic practices remains an active point of discussion.

Why the performance theory matters now 🔗

The Performance Theory is not just a philosopher’s puzzle. It has real stakes for how we value and preserve art, how we approach questions of authorship and authenticity, and how we make sense of entirely new art forms – including AI-generated art, where the question of who or what performed the generative act is genuinely unresolved.

If art is a performance, then the identity and value of an artwork are bound up with the actions and intentions of the agent who produced it. This makes the theory deeply humanistic in its implications – it insists that art is not merely a commodity or a decorative object, but a trace of human action in the world. At the same time, it opens difficult questions: What counts as a generative performance? Can a machine perform in the relevant sense? Can art emerge from accident or algorithm?

These questions have no easy answers, but that is precisely what makes the Performance Theory philosophically alive. By shifting the focus from the object to the act, from the thing to its making, it invites a richer and more demanding form of aesthetic engagement – one that asks us to think not just about what we are looking at, but about what happened, who did it, and why it matters.

What do you think? If the act of creation is itself the artwork, does the physical object left behind – the canvas, the score, the novel – have any independent artistic value? And how should we engage with art made by artificial intelligence, where no human performance in the traditional sense has taken place?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-ontology-history/
2. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9780470774922
3. https://portiaplacino.com/2011/03/30/david-davies-art-as-performance-critique/
4. https://www.amazon.com/Art-as-Performance-Dave-Davies/dp/1405116676
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood-aesthetics/
6. https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/48/2/162/24221
7. https://philpapers.org/rec/DAVCPT
8. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444343458
9. https://cdn.ymaws.com/aesthetics-online.org/resource/resmgr/files/diversity/Ventzislavov_Performance_Art.pdf