The Performance Art of David Bowie: A Remembrance

Abstract

This chapter argues that pop music is performance art. It is since the 1960s that pop music, as an art form, has really acquired its characteristic shape. It is the death of David Bowie, one of its greatest proponents—indeed, one of its inventors—that occasions this remembrance. Bowie is a great artist the way Andy Warhol is a great artist. And they are performance artists both. Warhol has about as much to do with painting (or visual art), really, as Bowie has to do with music. Warhol used visual art as a vehicle to make art in the medium of himself, and the same is true of Bowie and music. And this explains why it is that in the vast outpouring of admiration and mourning for Bowie, both by critics and fans, both in the press and also on social media, there has been barely a word devoted to Bowie's music.