Aesthetic Distance in the Performing Arts

Performing arts have by nature the possibility to emotionally involve the audience in ways, which are, in some important sense, “direct” and active, instead of contemplative. The audience is in the presence of flesh and blood people doing various things and of events happening in front of them. In other words, the artistic event happens live, in front of the spectators' eyes and ears, and sometimes it can even end with the audience turned into performers. This fact has lead some scholars to affirm that, to a certain extent, performing arts seem to cancel or at least to minimize the gap between art and life. This trend is mainly strong in more or less new art forms and art movements, like Performance Art, Happening, etc., that, for reasons of different kinds (aesthetic, social, political, philosophical, etc.), refused the idea of art as work and encouraged art as action and event. This idea of art as something “fluid”, not fixed, not ontologically steady, and as expression of free invention seems to come to fruition also in some art technique and ways of execution, like improvisation in jazz or in certain forms of theatrical play. It would seem obvious, then, to employ this idea of art as action, event and process in contrast with the traditional conception of art -based on works that should become objects of a particular experience, differentiated from the ordinary path of life by an alleged “aesthetic distance”. I will argue, on the contrary, that aesthetic “difference”, “distance” and “disinterest” are basic features also of the appreciation of art forms based on events or processes and that this stands even if art as a whole is taken as better understandable in terms of performance, event, action and process rather than in the traditional terms of work and composition.