Can Performance Art Cure Us of Brain Rot?

Late last month, Aspen Art Museum launched the inaugural edition of AIR, its new four-day festival of talks and performances. Matthew Barney headlined with TACTICAL parallax (2025), a live, ‘one time only’ crossover event that saw disparate elements from his major bodies of work – the dancing football players of SECONDARY (2023), the hunter from Redoubt (2018) and the horses of The CREMASTER Cycle 2 (1999) – collide. Inside the former drill hall of a mountainside ranch, the piece unfolded like a variety show of sorts, featuring cowboys, gunshots and vaudeville song and dance. It ran for just over an hour, yet the performance’s charismatic MC, played by Okwui Okpokwasili, posed a salient question to the audience as she sang: ‘Can you endure? Can you endure? Can you endure?’ 

Some viewers could not. While many enthusiastically praised the work (I enjoyed it), detractors told me they found it unbearable, maligning the lack of legible plot and the discomfort of sitting on hard metal bleachers. A few said the piece made them painfully aware of the minutes ticking by, something that I would argue is a good thing: whether or not they enjoyed that hour, they will at least remember how they spent it. In the midst of a brain rot epidemic – characterized by shallow engagement, a shortened attention span and loss of memory – viewing durational performances like Barney’s, live and in person, has the potential to reverse the damage. 

Brain rot is a consequence of what I’ll call ‘the Endless Stream’: a constant, malignantly soothing succession of content transmitted by screens. Prolonged exposure creates an expectation of immediacy that distorts our perception of time, a condition that’s been building for decades. In his 1993 essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, David Foster Wallace identified TV as a ‘river of image’ that had his generation by the throat at an average of six hours a day. Its ‘biggest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding’, he wrote, and it renders the passage of time so fluid as to become almost imperceptible. It lulls us into a passive state of high-volume, low-impact consumption, in which the last image is forgotten as soon as the next one appears.

The point of the Endless Stream is mainly commercial. It is intended to maximize consumption by minimizing friction. In the art industry, its brain-rotting consequences have given rise to a genre of crowd-pleasing simplicity, ideally viewed for only a few seconds at a time. (Dylan Kerr calls these ‘Frictionless Paintings’, while Rob Colvin refers to the ‘Kostabi Effect’.) The beauty of performance art – from Vito Acconci masturbating under the floorboards (Seedbed, 1972) to Adrian Piper soaking her clothing in rancid milk (Catalysis I, 1970) – is that it often actively rejects the spell of commerce and passive viewership, embracing the less marketable notes of discomfort, transgression and dematerialization. Piper’s aforementioned work was part of a larger performance series in which the artist confronted the unsuspecting public with the ‘catalytic agents’ of unsavory looks and smells. She sought no object but the viewer’s reaction and interpretation, extolling in her artist’s statement ‘the immediacy of the artist’s presence’.

This reciprocal exchange of energy between performer and viewer is part of what Walter Benjamin defined as ‘aura’, the integral essence of an original work of art that withers in reproduction. The benefit of in-person viewing is the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the auratic, sensory details: magnetism; texture; odour; tension. Hermann Nitsch’s magnum opus 6-Day-Play (1998) – conceived for the purposes of profound emotional release – engaged all five senses in its highest and lowest extremes: the gruesome sights and smells of animal organs in simulated ritual sacrifice; the orchestra’s blood-chilling frequencies; the intermittent joys of apple streudel and a Bavarian marching band. During its posthumous 2022 restaging in lower Austria, I stayed for two days and felt the visceral shift in my body from absolute hell into elation. Nitsch surprised me, and I surprised myself, when I joyfully burst into tears. No phones were allowed.

In a similarly participatory performance, Jota Mombaça’s The Muted Saints (2025) – staged as part of the AIR festival – had audience members blindly follow a live violinist single-file into the forest, beckoning us to be active rather than passive viewers. The sublime vision of a woman standing on the surface of a lake offered several moments of stillness followed by a chaotic finale of poetry, guttural moaning and yipping. As contrasting sensations, both scenes made a lasting impression, and neither allowed for mere cursory engagement.

If brain rot is slurping low-nutrient, frictionless slop through a straw, prolonged encounters of stillness, elation and discord like these represent a return to proper meals – not to mention the reclamation of our time, reappreaciation for human effort and substantial re-engagement with works of art. A well-balanced intellectual diet requires tough pieces to chew on that take time to digest. These are the good parts; the stuff that sticks with you after the performance ends. Unlike the Endless Stream, performance is finite and, outside of reproduction, only lives on in memory. 

_{Main image: Hermann Nitsch, 6-Day Play, 2022, performance documentation. Courtesy: Hermann Nitsch GmbH; photograph: eSeL}