MrBeast and Performance Art
How his extreme videos mirror the groundbreaking work of one of the world's greatest performance artists.
In 2019, my first year of art school, I took a very important class called Intro to Contemporary Art (ICAP). This is debatably the most important course I have ever taken in my entire life, as it was the first time I was ever exposed to the world of contemporary art.
Prior to taking this course, I was under the impression that modern art was limited to only those paintings in museums that make your stubborn, close-minded uncle say “I could have made that!!” (pieces like PH-774 by Clyfford Still or Untitled (Black on Gray) by Mark Rothko).
As I progressed through the course, my soul became enlightened by the idea that contemporary art could be much more than a blank canvas on a wall and rather an extremely thought-provoking segment of art history that brings forth entirely new ways to perceive art and the way it is presented to viewers.
One of the artists that sticks with me the most is Tehching Hsieh. Hsieh is debatably the most famous performance artist behind Marina Abramović. Abramović has even referred to Hsieh as “the master” of performance art. Hsieh is known to do outrageous acts for the sake of his work, this includes living on the streets of New York while completely avoiding shelter, and locking himself in a caged room without access to the outside world, both of these acts lasting an entire year.
Hsieh has even gone to lengths to harm himself physically, like in Jump Piece, where he jumped out of a second-floor window onto the ground, where he broke both of his ankles. He photographed this performance from a third-person POV, which he did throughout many of his performances.
This style of performance art, where the artist does an act to oneself that most people could never comprehend doing to themselves, is a strategy that many of the most successful performance artists have replicated.
Hsieh was fascinated with the concepts of time, isolation, existentialism, and the human condition. In Cage Piece he restricted himself to a cage 11.5 feet by 9 feet, with no entertainment, media, or human contact beyond basic sustenance. Hsieh did not allow himself to speak, read, or write. The duration of the performance lasted an entire year, furthering the concept of confinement and monotony. The core of the work is the mere act of putting oneself through this torture, something prison inmates in solitary confinement do not even endure.
Now, this is going to sound like an unhinged comparison, but hear me out. I see many parallels between Hsieh’s work and MrBeast’s YouTube videos. Yes, that MrBeast, the one who recreated Squid Game in real life and spent 50 hours buried alive in a coffin. In both MrBeast and Hsieh’s work there is a core theme of endurance. In earlier MrBeast videos, he would put himself through these challenges in order to go viral and gain an audience on YouTube. I remember the first time I saw one of his videos was when he said Logan Paul’s name 100,000 times on a livestream. Similar to Hsieh, MrBeast is putting himself (or others) through long and intense challenges to deliver shock value to his audience. The main difference between the two is that Hsieh does not document it to the extent that MrBeast does, which completely shifts the context in which the work is perceived.
Take his video Survive 100 Days Trapped, Win $500,000 where 2 contestants win half a million if they can stay in an isolation chamber for 100 days. This is almost identical to Hsieh’s Cage Piece in principle, with a few major differences. First, is the context in which both are performed, one is for entertainment and documented in depth and edited for content, while the other is performed in isolation, without much documentation or media attention, and is only discussed in retrospect. Second is the main motivation behind the works, MrBeast’s video is to entertain, generate viewer interest, and create viral content while testing endurance, Hsieh’s work is performed to explore themes of time, isolation, confinement, and the passage of life in an extreme and meditative form. His work is an introspective, existential statement, focusing on the experience of being rather than entertaining others. Third, which is the most obvious, is the reward attached to each work. For MrBeast he is using the monetary reward of $500,000 to incentivize the two contestants to stay in the chamber, while Hsieh has no monetary reward, and is imposing these constraints on himself merely for the love of the game.
This brings me to the importance of context in contemporary art. While both of these works are similar in nature, the purpose for their existence is vastly different. This is what is so exciting to me personally about contemporary art because you can put almost any object, action, or idea out of one context and into another and it will completely change its meaning. Take a look at Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 literally submitted a urinal in an art exhibition and it created the most controversy out of any artwork to this day.
It raised the question: What is art? A question that can’t really be answered. These philosophical and existential questions are the backbone of contemporary art. These questions force the viewer to reflect on their own existence and how these works relate to their own lives, in deep and meaningful ways.
And that was my biggest takeway from Intro to Contemporary Art in 2019.
Feel free to link your dad this article the next time you are in a museum and he sees a work that makes him say “I could have made that!!!!!”.