If you were at Art Basel in Switzerland in June, it is likely that you witnessed Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s iconic performance art – Untitled (Go Go Dancing Platform). It comprises a light blue wooden platform illuminated with 48 vanity lights on the edges. Different lamé-clad dancers come and move to music on their headphones for a few minutes at random moments throughout the day. Gonzales created the work in 1991 “during a moment of profound personal loss and against a backdrop of widespread homophobia” following the death of his partner. Presented at the annual fair by Hauser and Wirth, the work was priced at $16 million.
India itself, as Jaya Asokan, the director of the India Art Fair notes, is in its “golden age” of performance art. Veterans like Ratanabali Kant along with seasoned performance artists Inder Salim, Vibha Galhotra and Nikhil Chopra–also the curator of this year’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale– have paved the way for a new generation of performance artists – Debashish Paul, Sajan Mani, Arpita Akhanda, Shweta Bhattad and Ashwini Bhat – who are making the medium as significant as any other, both in terms of its social purpose and financial returns. But, how does one buy art that is ephemeral? If one buys Gonzales’s Go Go Dancing Platform, for instance, what comes in the box? The wooden platform? Yes. The lights? Yes. The dancers. Obviously not. How does the economics of performance art work then?
Performance art, as defined by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), uses actions, gestures and the artist’s physical presence as the primary medium. Its ‘live’ nature and the physical human presence makes the transaction of it tricky. Unlike a painting or a sculpture, which are tangible, performance art is transitory, making the purchase of the work in all its essence seem impossible. Attempting to do that would be, as art historian Jean Wainwright had famously said, like “trying to keep smoke in your pocket”.
Asokan, however, believes that the medium’s ephemerality – the fact that it resists categorisation, lingers in memory and demands presence – is its strength. “This transience does not mean it is ‘uncollectable’ — it simply requires a more expansive understanding of what it means to own such an artwork,” she says.
The evidence of performance art, therefore, is either photographic or video documentation of the act, which is what a collector generally acquires, along with, sometimes, the props or elements used. The key question then, says Smriti Rajgarhia, Director Serendipity Arts Foundation and Festival, becomes: What exactly are you collecting? Is it the documentation? The right to restage it under defined conditions? Or are you commissioning a one-time live event?
According to Angelle Siyang-Le, Director Art Basel, Hong Kong, performance art is appreciated for its concept and process. She cites how, at the fair’s 2024 edition, Japanese artist Ken Kagami’s The World of Ken Kagami was a daily live performance where visitors received free portraits, blending concept and experience. “This shows how performance art challenges traditional ideas of ownership by focusing on the artwork’s ongoing life rather than a static object,” Siyang-Le adds.
In 2013, Shweta Bhattad dressed up as Bharat Mata for Do Glorified Rape Scenes in Movies Inspire you to Rape? to talk about the representation of rape in Indian cinema. Among other things, she wore a chastity belt that played a compilation of rape scenes from different films from the ’80s to the present. “A Mumbai-based collector purchased the chastity belt that Shweta used in her performance,” reveals Bhavna Kakar of Delhi-based Gallery Latitude 28, which represents the artist.
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Several works by Debashish Paul, who explores the challenges of queer existence in a heteronormative society, have been sold as sets of cinematic videos, says Ushmita Sahu, Director & Head Curator at Kolkata’s Emami Art. “The acquisition by a private collector included high-resolution video files and a certificate of authenticity issued by the artist and Emami Art,” she adds.
Another, albeit fairly new, mode of collecting performance art is by minting NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Buying an NFT lets the owner acquire a digital version of the performance. Serbian artist Marina Abramovich, in 2022, dropped an NFT series for The Hero (2001). Earlier this year, she launched a series of NFTs under the digital project Marina Abramovic Element (MAE) that lets buyers interact with the artist’s digital avatar, allowing the 78-year-old artist “to do what her physical body can’t”.
A still from Arpita Akhanda’s ‘360 Minutes of Requiem’
In India, although there is growing curiosity among new media collectors and institutions, adoption remains limited. “NFTs can function as certificates of authenticity for digital documentation or even represent the right to a unique, unrepeated performance. However, practical, legal and infrastructural concerns — especially around sustainability, copyright and artist rights — mean the format remains niche, though promising,” she elaborates.
Owning art traditionally comes with a sense of exclusivity. The more inaccessible the work, the higher the price. The economics of performance art challenge this fundamental functioning of the art market.
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“Ownership of performance art documentation or NFTs typically grants rights to that specific recorded or digital representation, but it does not usually restrict the artist from restaging or presenting the performance again,” explains Siyang-Le, adding, “Unlike traditional artworks where exclusivity is tied to a singular physical object, performance art embraces sharing and repeated visibility. This fluidity reflects contemporary art’s focus on experience and accessibility rather than strict exclusivity.”
NFTs or documentation of performance art can, therefore, be thought of as equivalent to artist-signed prints of paintings. They are exclusive in the way they have limited editions, but accessible in the way they can be owned by more than one individual.
To explain how ownership of a performance piece is determined by the contractual and conceptual framework that accompanies the work, Asokan cites the example of Tate, UK, which has done “extensive research into examining emerging practice for collecting and conserving performance-based art”. “The overarching idea behind this kind of ownership is access and stewardship, not just possession,” she adds. Accessibility was a major factor also for Abramovic when she decided to venture into the NFT space. In several interviews, she has said that the decision was rooted in her desire to connect with a younger, tech-savvy collector base.
Traditionally, performance art has attracted a broad and evolving spectrum of collectors comprising institutions such as museums, public foundations and biennales. More recently, there has been a newer, particularly younger, wave of private collectors. “They are comfortable navigating the conceptual terrain that performance art occupies,” Asokan says, talking about her observations of IAF’s Young Collectors Programme.
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If buying performance art needs an understanding of the medium, grasping the legalities of the transaction requires a deep-dive into the artist’s practice.
SAF has “a model centred around commissioning, collaboration and archiving, with the intent of nurturing experimentation and enabling sustained engagement with the form,” says Rajgarhia.
The IAF maintains a “standard template” to ensure clarity, but the specifics of each contract are adapted to reflect the unique needs of the artist. For Ashwini Bhat, who performed Earth Under Our Feet – where she takes unfired clay and kneads it under her feet, while calling upon the audience to do the same–at the fair this year, programming was key. “It is important for me that my work is presented in an accessible way,” she says, adding that the clay was eventually returned to the local potters in Delhi, something that aligned with the ideology of sustainability that she works with.
German-Indian artist Tino Sehgal, “famously does not allow written information to be published and allows the instructions to be delivered orally from him or his representative to others only through actual human interaction,” says Doryun Chong, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, M+ Museum, Hong Kong. “He believes in the purity of the moment in which you’re spending time with his work… There’s no medium other than two bodies,” the museum notes.
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While acquiring Sehgal’s 2002 performance work Guards Kissing in 2012, the curators at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum “were thus given instructions verbally,” Chong says, adding, “Through the history of modern and contemporary art, art has become time-based, durational, immaterial and ephemeral. At some point, even such new forms of art become institutionalised and would also be built into the history of art, and successive generations of artists come along to challenge and critique. Guards Kissing is an example of how an artist has pushed performance art genre and conceptual art to the next level.”
Sehgal’s sentiments about the medium are resonated by most performance artists. Arpita Akhanda, whose mixed media work ‘Dendritic Data Ib’ won her the 30,000 USD Sovereign Art Prize earlier this year, says, “Performance art allows me to question and examine my perception of the world in its rawest form, unfiltered by the delays or translations that often come with working with other mediums.”
Often perceived as driven by purpose rather than profit, Asokan argues that the two are not necessarily opposed. “Performance art sits at a unique juncture between embodied presence and political expression — and, increasingly, market viability. When performance is collected with respect for the artist’s intent and supported with the right frameworks for preservation and presentation, it can circulate across both spheres.”