Posts Tagged ‘performance art’

Ben Shapiro

Performance Art: I Hereby Volunteer to Vomit on Susan Sarandon

by Ben Shapiro

20041020_Leno_SusanSarandon

According to James Hirsen of Examiner.com, Susan Sarandon had an odd night recently:

Sarandon attended the third anniversary of The Box in New York’s Lower East Side.  A transsexual cabaret performer named Rose Wood engaged in projectile vomiting on stage and hit Sarandon with it. Standing nearby were Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber. According to Wood it was not intended as an affront to the actress and she didn’t take it that way. “Apparently [Sarandon] got a big kick out of it. She squealed with surprise and loved it when several handsome gentlemen wiped it off of her. She had a ball! I saw her assistant downstairs afterward, and he was moved by it! She was in great spirits,” Wood told the New York Press. 

Nothing says fun like vomit.  (more…)

Jeffrey Jena

Stand Up Notes From Flyover Country: Lady HaHa

by Jeffrey Jena

I was doing a little channel surfing a few weeks ago and happened across some sort of music awards show. I believe it was The American Music Awards but judging from the level of the performances it could have been some sort of reality show. What caused me to stop for a moment was seeing who I thought was Madonna doing a little dance number in combat boots.

gaga hair

Madonna is famous for, among other things, reinventing herself. “Reinventing” is show business talk for falling to a new level of depravity. You never see the Hollywood press praising someone for finding faith or cleaning up their act but if they demean Christian values or morality, they get raves. So I was interested to see if this was some sort of political or religious statement or just the latest fashion craze.

So I watched the performance for a few moments. The woman who was the focus to the number then moved to a piano inside a glass case which later ignited in flames. I started to suspect that this wasn’t Madonna because to the best of my knowledge she doesn’t play the piano and is old enough to remember that the late Michael Jackson set himself on fire awhile back. At the end of the song the woman leaned back with outstretched arms as if to say I have exhausted myself as an artist by dancing and lip syncing for three minutes.

(more…)

Kurt Schlichter

I Want My NEA Grant!

by Kurt Schlichter

Chairman Rocco Landesman
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),  Washington, D.C.

Dear Chairman Landesman:

With all this fuss on Big Hollywood.com, Big Government.com and elsewhere over the NEA’s government-funded forays into partisan political propaganda, I thought maybe we could help each other out. 


Right now, you probably want to support some art that addresses vital current issues from a right-wing perspective in order to demonstrate your impartiality (ha ha!), and I just want to cash in your organization’s evident willingness to spend good tax money on any kind of nonsense that can be passed-off as “art” (ca-ching!)   

Well, I am uniquely suited to provide you with just what you’re looking for!  As a college student, I got a “B” in my Visual Arts 1 class for dressing up a juniper bush in one of my Hawaiian shirts to draw attention to man’s essential oneness with nature while providing a stinging critique of America’s consumerist culture.  Sure, my black-clad, Bauhaus-loving classmates protested that I was a fraud who was more concerned with collecting four easy credits than internalizing our professor’s commie insights about how expressionism equals imperialism, but hey – aren’t all great artists rebels?   Or, at least, weren’t they before last January 20th? (more…)

Leigh Scott

Performance Art Taken to New Levels

by Leigh Scott

The more I watch clips like Janeane Garofalo’s appearance on the Olbermann show, the more I’m convinced that its not real.  That’s right.  Allow me to introduce to the world a new form of “trutherism.” I have discovered a new conspiracy.  I think leftist talking heads are faking it.

In the late 1970s the brilliant Andy Kaufman created an alter ego, Tony Clifton.  Kaufman demanded that his “friend” Tony get a role on the show Taxi.  He then proceeded to cause such a disturbance on set (including hiring hookers to accompany him) that his co-stars walked off the production. Not once did Kaufman admit or acknowledge that he and Clifton were the same person.  He never broke character. It was a brilliant, immersive piece of performance art.

Kaufman’s legacy of blending performance art, comedy, and audacious behavior continues today.  Witness Jon Stewart, Garofalo, Ed Shultz, Olbermann, Susan Roesgen, Michael Moore, Rosie O’Donnell and countless other performers.  How else can you explain such over the top examples of derangement?  What better way to distance yourself from the pack by espousing views and analysis that fly in the face of history and common sense?  When Olbermann looks at the camera with a straight face and talks about Dick Cheney’s secret assassination squads, you have to admire his ability to not loose composure like Horatio Sanz in the middle of an SNL sketch.

How could anyone consider the philosophies of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, witness the awesome display of grassroots demonstration that is the Tea Party movement, and hear the pleas of average citizens to stop government spending and boil it all down to “racism”?  You can’t.  It’s a joke.  An elaborate hoax.  It’s funnier than Gallagher smashing a watermelon and more intricate than the Punk’d episode where Ashton Kutcher totally set up Frankie Muniz. (more…)