The Economy of Performance Art
Are we in the century of performance?
Working as a club promoter and event producer in London’s underground scene throughout the post-Covid years, I watched galleries, institutions and brands become conspicuously interested in performance and nightclub-adjacent formats, even though such work remains notoriously difficult to sell and collect. In London, galleries and institutions such as Nicoletti, Cedric Bardawil, Hauser & Wirth and the ICA fold live work into their programmes, with artists such as operformance, David Varhegyi, and more. The performance economy is not simply a turn from object to event. It is a turn from image to atmosphere, from irony to engagement, from artwork to audience management. A gallery, brand or patron no longer asks only what the work is. They ask who will come, who will post, who will be seen, who will feel implicated, and who will later convert that feeling into symbolic,social and monetary value.
David Varhegyi at operformancef LIVE X Adult Entertainment at Nicoletti. Photo by Eizabeth Watson
One explanation lies in the exhaustion of the ‘image’, which no longer represents a singular event or artwork so much as it circulates, detached from origin, context and authorship. Dani Marcel, an artist and co-founder of operformancef, a ‘magazine of performance’, alongside David Varhegyi, describes the shift more bluntly. “I think performance has been gaining momentum since Covid for a few reasons,” he says. “Object based art got really boring and boredom started leaking into sales and into discourse. Performance feels ongoing, unfinished, with the rules not written yet, which simply makes it more fun.”
Social media taught a generation to expect culture that is clean, legible and unfailingly polite. Performance trades on the opposite among different fronts of art scenes, institutions and brands. For instance, The Mandrake hotel’s residencies, and its work with collectives such as BULLYACHE, position performance less as an artistic medium than as an import of immediacy and rawness that the feed has bleached out. Maguelone Marcenac, The Mandrake’s Creative Director of Events, says that performance “has the ability to transform a space and create a shared moment,” and “can often reach people who might not otherwise engage with contemporary art”.
Against the flattening effects of the algorithm, liveness is scarce and therefore desirable. Performance offers what the feed cannot contain: duration, bodies, risk, boredom, embarrassment and the somewhat fragile social authority of witnessing. A durational piece, a sound installation or a private dinner does not only produce content. It produces engagement.
Engagement, however, is distinct from authenticity. Performance sits inside the attention economy as one of its most refined products: a luxury technology of presence, dealing in social credit. Through this lens, Florentina Holzinger‘s SEAWORLD Venice Biennale commission reads less as a nostalgic return to body art than as evidence of performance’s new institutional value. After the announcement of her Biennale commission, Holzinger became represented by Thaddeus Ropac gallery, making her trajectory telling: an artist working in a form traditionally difficult for galleries to contain has become newly legible within the exhibition economy.
As Holzinger notes in frieze, the Biennale is “not made” for performance, and entering it requires a certain hustle, compromise and logistical translation. Rather than resolving the contradiction between live art and the market, Holzinger’s commission exposes it: performance is now desirable precisely because it remains awkward, expensive, unstable and difficult to fully possess. Every performance is haunted by the story it may become: the photograph, the caption, the person who will later say they were there.
Consider Berlin. Earlier this year, Pierre Huyghe’s Liminals, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, was installed inside Halle am Berghain, the exhibition hall attached to the city’s most mythologised club. Film, sound and light were folded into a venue already charged with darkness, restricted access and local rumour. LAS gained legitimacy beyond the white cube, and Berghain gained recognition as a serious cultural platform; the audience received Berghain aura farming without entering the club. What was produced was less an artwork than a temporary public, organised around strategic proximity.
The Barbican reversed the movement. Where LAS borrowed the club’s aura, Feel the Sound (2025) absorbed the club into the institution’s own body. Joyride, by Temporary Pleasure with Boiler Room, staged in Car Park 5, did not present nightlife as an object of study; it turned the institution into a nightlife environment. The choice of Boiler Room matters, since it is not a foundation but a commercial broadcaster of nightlife, a machine for converting marginal subcultures into globally legible capital. Its presence signals the institution’s access to a scene it did not produce. The visitor no longer stands in front of club culture; they are enrolled into it, briefly producing the very atmosphere on display - which is not something new or bad - but rather another iteration of virtualising a certain experience through symbols, with no pretence to authenticity.
Next case, Prada Mode London, the brand’s travelling private members’ club, makes the argument almost too literally. Staged during Frieze week last year alongside Elmgreen & Dragset and Pace, its centrepiece, The Audience, was a cinema-like installation where watching itself became part of the spectacle. The point was not only the film, the architecture or the figures placed among the seats, but the social situation created around them. Prada was not simply sponsoring an artwork, it was producing a temporary cultural environment somewhere between a private club, screening, dinner and salon. In this setting, the audience became part of the work, visible to one another as participants in a carefully staged scene of attention.
The cynical reading is easy: performance becomes a soft pipeline into adjacent industries, like fashion, hospitality, music, luxury and media. A room of the right people is more useful than a wall of objects, with social currency transforming into the real capital. Arguably, the audience becomes the medium of the work. The alternative reading is that everyone involved also loves the game, the dinner, the screening and the DJ set, and that these are not marketing accessories but the infrastructure through which culture, historically, recognises itself.
operformancef LIVE X Adult Entertainment at Nicoletti. Photo by Eizabeth Watson
Marcel sums this up: “I think galleries are following this [performance-oriented] trend. London galleries especially are collaboration-friendly, so it’s quite natural for them to host performance-only programs like ours. But I think they have to figure out models for representing performance artists as a next step, without asking them to produce objects.
I always say this to everybody, we’re in the century of performance.”