feature some discrepancy between the expectations of marriage, and its reality. Comment on at least two of them, comparing and contrasting their depictions of married life. How are the styles of these works similar and different? Are they comical? Sad? What is the attitude of the implied author (or artist) towards the subject? Alternatively, comment on some other aspect of at least two of the three works for this week.
The reading for this week, Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” raises several questions about artistic accomplishment, such as:
• What is the relationship between the difficulty of a performance and its quality or capacity to impress people?
• What does it mean for a performance to be authentic? What does it mean for a performance to be artificial?
• Does it matter if a performance looks difficult to the audience, but is easy for the performer?
• What does it mean to be impressed by a performance, as opposed to enjoying it?
• What is the role of the marketplace and advertising in performing art? What sort of role does the impresario play, and why does the artist resent him?
• What does it mean to “cheat” at a performance?
• How does commercial success or failure affect an artist’s or the public’s sense of an artwork’s quality?
There are also some questions to be raised about the characters, such as:
• What else does the hunger artist deprive himself of, other than food? How are these other deprivations important to his performance and to his story?
• What are the religious parallels to the story?
• In what ways are the hunger artist and the panther different?
• Suppose we think of the artist, impresario, and panther as being representative of different human drives habits. What do they represent?
• How is Marina Abramović’s performance similar and different to Kafka’s story?
• What is your own subjective response to Abramović’s performance? Do you find it fascinating, pretentious, thoughtful, provocative, annoying? Why?
