performance art

American  

noun

1. a collaborative art form originating in the 1970s as a fusion of several artistic media, as painting, film, video, music, drama, and dance, and deriving in part from the 1960s performance happenings.

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performance art British  

noun

1. a theatrical presentation that incorporates various art forms, such as dance, sculpture, music, etc

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Other Word Forms

• performance artist
  noun

Etymology

Origin of performance art

First recorded in 1970–75

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

performance art

Even “Straight White Men,” which uses the old home-for-the-holidays genre as a springboard, can’t help spinning away from the drama’s droll hyper-naturalism toward something resembling performance art.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 29, 2026

Trump is now in the stage of his performance art where he is like a comedian doing crowd work at a small club to test out new material.

From Salon ● Jun. 23, 2026

Three years later, in a highly theatrical piece of performance art, he staged a live destruction of his Girl with Balloon at Sotheby's auction house - moments after it was sold for £1m.

From BBC ● Mar. 18, 2026

All land art is performance art to some extent, and Michael Heizer spent more than 50 years shaping “City.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 15, 2026

“No one ever understands performance art when it’s on the cutting edge.”

From "Landscape with Invisible Hand" by M.T. Anderson