It's still valid to argue that this was an audience, rather than something generalizable to humankind. Conformity looks very different depending on context: if this piece were being performed in an Amish community it would look very different than it did, not because of less group conformity (there would likely be stronger conformity) but because of conformity to different norms.
It's a piece though. It hasn't been performed multiple times because of the safety issue, but at its core the idea is that you could repeat it for arbitrary audiences.
Yes, in practice the performance history can only shed a little light on the nature of audience, but the piece is conceptually capable of broader insight.
> but at its core the idea is that you could repeat it for arbitrary audiences.
That's the idea, but I don't see any strong reason to believe it. There are too many unknowns for me right now.
We do not know how the event was marketed. Who was invited? What were they told in advance? Presumably this wasn't a random sample, it was a self-selected group of people, and how the event was presented would determine the type of people who showed up.
Here's what I do know: It was scheduled for 6 hours from 8pm-2am on a Wednesday, and she had previously engaged in some very violent performance art [0][1][2][3]. That suggests that the audience is self-selected away from people who have jobs or families, and that the audience was primed to expect that she wanted a violent performance. Another commenter indicated that the audience egged each other on in the name of the performance.
This does not suggest to me an event that could be recreated with an arbitrary audience by an arbitrary performer.
> This does not suggest to me an event that could be recreated with an arbitrary audience by an arbitrary performer.
Could you explain why not? What's stopping me from putting on a preformance if this in my project space next week? (other than intellectual property concerns)
