The Taming of the Artist

 Over the past century, the performing arts have tried to abandon the traditional social settings in favor of new scenarios for the representation of the work of art. This simple action increases the liminality of performance, for the ritual needs closed and well established scenarios. The resistance to such changes comes mainly from the general public, which needs to identify the performative actions within a mythical-ritual axis in order to give it credit. Such an authority valuates art from the point of view of ancient mythological actions. This produces a curious paradox. On the one hand, the general public desires and looks for the unanimity of criteria in relation to the work of art, it is the desire for a universal law. We need judgments like: “Beethoven's immortal symphonies”, even when we never took the time to listen to all of them in order to justify such a criterion. On the other, we want the artist to be original, which implies the impossibility of a consensus in relation to his/her work, for there are not clear grounds for the judgment. This way, the artist is tamed by the whip of traditional art forms. His/hers only escape is the neurosis of an excessive individuality, which is always judged in relation to the traditional art form, so even his individuality becomes part of the same whip. The only way out for the artist is the direct work over the narratives of identity, but this implies a form of art which is not yet recognized as such.