RoseLee Goldberg's book Performance; Live Art 1909 to the Present, published in 1979 indicated in its closing chapter that performance art was moving more and more into the realm of entertaintment, using forms such as cabaret, television sitcoms and rock n'roll as the basis for new work, away from the more esoteric and often paradoxical work of the seventies, with its insistence on ideas over product, and concept over commonly accepted professional execution. Indeed, as this extract from the update of Ms. Goldberg's book Performance (plublished in the fall of 1987) shows, her predictions for the eighties were remarkably accurate. The new generations have created a body of work that is obsessed with the popular media. Indeed, the old cry by artists to break clown the barriers between life and art has, in their work, meant the breakdown between art and the media, often referred to as one between High art and Low. Ms. Goldberg describes the theatrical and highly professional mood of eighties performance, concluding at the same time that performance, despite its popularisation by the media, despite art school curricula and dissertations, remains an open ended and unpredictable medium for artistic experimentation.
