Art and Human Interaction

In this Editor’s column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of ‘performance’ to works of art. Art works can be viewed as performances, the public furnishing of works’ final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise moral situations. Not all performances are artistic, let alone art.