ic, political, or social statements with their art. Some, like Caravaggio rejected the constraints of tradition and invented new forms of art. Others, like Velazquez, like to react against state and religious oppression of the people in their paintings. So, too, performance artists are often able to make such artistic, social, or political statements through their performance art. For example, one NEA grant recipient who is a performance artist wears a hula skirt that is constructed from dollar bills. He connects his wrist to the door of a bank via a string of sausages. This performance art is a commentary on modern capitalist existence, in which a man is forced to become nothing more than a means of production for the rich because he is forced to do so in order to earn his supper, or in this interpretation, his sausages.
Another similarity share by painting and performance art comes from the fact that quite often they are used to show an appreciation of or to deepen our understanding of his
...