Performance Art: The Last Bastion of an Artworld Beyond the Market?

Among the headline-grabbing resignations, protests, withdrawals and closures during the preview week of this year’s Venice Biennale, there was another subject on everyone’s lips: performance art. If you didn’t see Austria’s Florentina Holzinger dangling upside down from a bell in the flesh, then you certainly saw her splashed across the front pages and everyone’s Instagram feeds as this year’s hero image. Then there were the frenzied performers in Miet Warlop’s IT NEVER SSST making a right racket in the Belgian Pavilion, and the grunts and snarls reverberating behind the closed shutters of the Dutch Pavilion next door. Beyond the Giardini, Marina Abramović’s major retrospective at Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia was always going to be a crowd pleaser. Given that Koyo Kouoh, the main exhibition’s late curator, called on the artworld to relinquish its rapacious appetite for spectacle, it is ironic, if predictable, that spectacle is exactly what early visitors have flocked to.

Many of the Biennale’s smash hits in recent years have been performance-based, including the German Pavilion in 2024 and 2017, with Ersan Mondtag and Anne Imhof respectively, and Lithuania’s operatic work Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė winning the Golden Lion in 2019. It’s no surprise then that other nations might look to replicate this formula to ensure the critical success that word-of-mouth virality and snaking queues imply. This year has seen Belgium and the Netherlands foregrounding live art for the very first time, and Austria, Japan, Iceland and Estonia are also leading with the artform.

Not that everyone agrees it’s the right move, mind you. There have been some grumblings that the Biennale Arte is not the time or place for such work, given that the Biennale Teatro and Biennale Danza exist. Some are choosing to pivot in the opposite direction. Lithuania sees artist Eglė Budvytytė present a powerful multichannel film installation, animism sings anarchy, despite being best known for her performance practice. It is even curated by a leading voice in the field – Louise O’Kelly, founding director of the international performance festival and commissioning body Block Universe. Sun & Sea (Marina) may have caused a sensation, but perhaps it was a pill Lithuania didn’t want to swallow twice. Estimated to have cost approximately $3 per minute to stage (excluding technical assistance, venue and preparatory costs), organisers had to embark on multiple rounds of crowdfunding to keep up with audience demand.

Marina Abramović, Transforming Energy, 2026 (installation view, Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia). Photo: Matteo de Fina. Courtesy the artist

Legend has it that Venice sits aloft the art market unspoiled, but such idealism overlooks the stark realities of how most projects are realised and how they are financed. There’s a lot of money being spent at Venice, and a lot of money being made too. But performance art and the market have always been uneasy, if not unwilling bedfellows. Of the performance artists selected to represent their countries, only two – Holzinger and Japan’s Ei Arakawa-Nash – have commercial gallery representation, with Thaddaeus Ropac announcing its signing of Holzinger only a couple of months before vernissage week. So what does the rise of performance at this year’s Biennale signal? In the art market’s current sluggish state, are dealers being myopic and missing a trick?

“Even if this is the Visual Arts Biennial, it’s still kind of like a festival with the attention economy of a festival,” curator Caroline Dumalin tells The Art Journal when asked what encouraged Belgium to select performance art for the first time. “People might give two minutes, pop their head in, pop back out. You have to be aware of that. It’s not just a crowning achievement of a career anymore,” she adds. “Miet Warlop has so much experience in that – she thrives in these festival contexts.”

For Dumalin, it’s essential to present bold work that can take audiences by the scruff of the neck: “If you see everything that has come at us in recent years also through this screen culture, in our visual streams, in our information streams – all the crises, the wars, the impossible things that somehow are possible in this world – I think there can also be a kind of fatigue if art is ‘business as usual’,” she continues. For younger generations whose entire lives have been lived online, she adds, “This kind of return to physicality, materiality, [can be] something to introduce through the arts because it becomes harder to find in the digital world.”

In our experience economy of recent years, performance art has been a permanent fixture in museum programmes for its capacity to create ‘gathering points’ for general audiences and facilitate feelings of community. Scoring highly in these areas of engagement has been an essential requirement for funding streams since the UK government recast public cultural institutions as places to plug the gaps for closed community centres and depleted social services. But research suggests HNW collectors of all ages have the same hunger pangs for connection and a sense of belonging. While this year’s Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report didn’t even include a category for live art, a key finding in their Survey of Global Collecting published last autumn showed that increasingly ‘being part of something’ is a key motivator for today’s wealthiest collectors of fine art and antiques. Women are especially driven by ‘building connections and making friendships with like-minded individuals’.

Perhaps as galleries chase younger, female audiences ahead of the incoming ‘Great Wealth Transfer’, which according to the UBS Global Wealth Report will see an estimated $83 trillion pass to spouses and younger inheritors by 2048, live art will be increasingly deployed as a key entry point for a new segment of collectors who are more comfortable with its intangible status and simply want to be in the room. That 75 percent of female collectors hope to donate works from their collections to museums compared to 64 percent of their male counterparts might be further read as a healthy signal for those invested in the artform. “There’s a real value in acquiring performance works, in particular for institutional collections,” Louise O’Kelly tells The Art Journal, “because this is how we build narratives of art history and this is how works, in theory, can have longevity and potentially be accessed by future generations if a work is to be restaged.”

Florentina Holzinger, Seaworld Venice, 2026 © Nicole Marianna Wytyczak

While viewing unruly performance art can offer an experience that’s ‘more real’, it’s also perfect fodder for the social algorithms it’s supposedly an antidote for – crucial in an age when Instagram increasingly plays an important role in the sales process and rewards those who post video.

This all presumes the artist wants in on the game in the first place. To some, performance today remains the last bastion of an artworld outside the grubby influences of the marketplace. For others it’s been a fight hard-won: “Of course I find it a bit of a pity that I don’t have a gallery, but if I did have a gallery now, that would also be a bit crazy for me – to do everything on my fucking own for 20 years, and then now somebody comes to take 50 percent of all my investments. And I really speak about energetic investments,” the artist Miet Warlop tells The Art Journal. “For most artists, it’s kind of a miracle, I think, that they managed to continue to practise and sustain a career if it’s not a very commercial practice,” O’Kelly concurs. “It's really a challenge, but for artists who are committed to their practice, this is a belief system, a way of being in the world.” But equally, artists need to eat, and the hustle can get exhausting.

For the dealers who do support artists working in live art and less commercial practices, sales aren’t always the be all and end all. Thaddaeus Ropac tells The Art Journal: “For us, the greatest success to come out of Venice will be for the artist [Florentina Holzinger] to develop relationships or projects with international institutions... specifically those travelling over from Korea and in Japan, where there is an incredible history of performance art.” He adds, “Out of courtesy to the institutions involved, it’s when works become available after Venice when we would offer them. But for Venice this is not our priority.”

Profit can be reaped elsewhere. The institutional partnerships and press coverage that artists with strong critical profiles can attract, and the access to high-profile curators this permits, can be a major pull for new artists and clients alike. It’s a longer game at play, one that exclusively deals in the currencies of cultural relevance, intellectual capital and access. In a fiercely competitive market, when galleries are chasing more mainstream market darlings to prop up their programmes, the more evidence they can boast that they encourage artists’ experimentation and ambition, the stronger their case as potential suitors. While an acclaimed performance artist might not make much money for themselves, they can help others do so by their very proximity.

“Three weeks ago Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir was having a performance and she said to me, ‘It might be the best performance I’ve ever done in my life, or it might just flop’. And that’s what we want – all the time,” Iceland Pavilion curator Margrét Áskelsdóttir says of Pocket Universe, Sigurðardóttir’s presentation at Venice, which leans heavily into themes of uncertainty. This is the very power of performance – inherently unpredictable and volatile, threatening to unravel into chaos at any given moment. Given the current state of affairs, and the fluctuating whims of certain world leaders, what could be more relevant?