Dear Greg, do I have to pretend to like performance art?

Dear Greg,

Do I have to pretend to like performance art? I often find myself baffled or bored, but everyone else looks deadly serious. Is it fine to admit I don’t get it, or is there a way I’m supposed to watch?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that you don’t have to pretend, but you do have to watch. Performance art has a particular knack for making otherwise intelligent people feel stupid. There you are, sitting in a darkened gallery as someone writhes, mumbles, or dances in rags. The crowd around you looks very serious, brows furrowed, as if they’re solving a puzzle. You, meanwhile, are wondering how long this goes on, whether the bar is still open, and if anyone else is feeling quite as baffled.

This is a common anxiety. Performance art doesn’t behave like painting. A painting you can glance at, dislike, and walk past. A bad performance pins you in place. You are its hostage. That is part of the problem – when it’s dull, it’s really dull. But when it works, it can be extraordinary, because it resists distraction. You can’t scroll past it. It requires your time, your awkward silence and your generosity.

That generosity is the key. When I was on my MA, one of the first things we did was to hang a piece of work on the wall and then sit in silence as our peers discussed it. For nearly two hours you weren’t allowed to speak, explain, or defend – you simply listened. As the exhibitor, you learnt what your work was actually saying, but more importantly here, as a spectator, you learnt the skill of looking slowly, thinking carefully, and speaking with empathy. You learnt that art isn’t a riddle with one solution but a conversation – sometimes halting and sometimes frustrating – that rewards the time you give it.

Performance art is often baffling because it forces you into that MA crit position. It asks you to stop solving and start noticing. To suspend disbelief, or at least suspend the reflex to dismiss. Some people can’t do it. I remember a TV show, a sort of celebrity Bake Off for art, where the tutors showed the students a Gabriel Orozco bicycle – just slightly larger than scale, a sixth bigger, just enough to feel uncanny. The point was the strangeness, it was familiar yet off-kilter, but John Humphreys, the veteran newsreader, drafted in as a student, just couldn’t make the leap. He needed to know, to explain, to resolve. The open-endedness was intolerable.

And this may be part of it: some people are just wired for certainty. They don’t hear music in ambiguity. Just as some are tone-deaf or hopeless at sport, there may be a category of person who cannot, no matter how generous they try to be, open themselves to the ineffable. And that’s fine, but it also means that a room full of serious faces may include people just as bored as you, disguising it with their best “I’m concentrating” expression.

In Britain, of course, we add another layer: suspicion of anything “arty”. Our national character leans towards scepticism. We like art that can be slotted between a sofa and a drinks cabinet. The avant-garde has long been treated as effeminate or laughable. Performance, with its deliberate awkwardness and occasional campness, can trigger that reflex in even the most open-minded viewer. Eyebrows lift and jokes are muttered. It is easier to roll our eyes than to risk being thought earnest.

So what to do when confronted with a performance piece that leaves you cold? First, recognise that you don’t need to “like” it. The language of liking and not liking is inherited from shopping, not art. Instead, try asking: what is it trying to do? What is it resisting? What mood or idea is it throwing at the room? Sometimes that reflection will open a door. Sometimes it won’t. But even the act of trying is worthwhile, because it shifts you from passive to engaged.

Second, remember that scepticism is part of the deal. The best performances don’t demand reverence, they provoke doubt, discomfort, even irritation. You don’t have to clap politely and swallow the boredom. You can let yourself be annoyed, confused and unsettled. That is still a response. It’s still engagement.

And third, accept that a lot of performance art is bad. Not in the sense of “I didn’t like it,” but bad in the sense of lazy, unconsidered, or self-indulgent. The medium is prone to pretension. But then, so is painting. The difference is that a bad painting lets you move on; a bad performance makes you sit through the full hour. If you hate it, that doesn’t make you a philistine. It makes you honest.

So no, you don’t have to pretend. What you do have to do, if you want to give art a fair shake, is to watch generously. To lend it your time and attention, even if only for ten minutes. To practise openness in the face of ambiguity. You may still walk away baffled, but you’ll have tested your own capacity for patience, empathy, and curiosity. And on the rare occasions when a performance really does hit – that sudden shiver of recognition, the uncanny sense that something ineffable has brushed past you – you’ll know it was worth the risk.

Performance art, at its best, isn’t about entertainment. It’s about practising the art of attention itself. And attention, in our age of endless scrolling, may be the rarest and most valuable thing we have to offer.