Performance-Lectures Are Having a Moment — and Maya Man’s Sold-Out Brooklyn Show Shows Why
A packed room at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn offered a clear sign that the performance-lecture has moved from niche format to something closer to a cultural language. In mid-May, artist Maya Man performed StarQuest, a work that grew out of her show StarPower, before an audience so full that Ivana Dama, interim director of Harvestworks, repeatedly noted how unexpected the sellout was.
The appeal of the form is easy to see once it begins. The artist steps forward, speaks directly to the audience, and turns the stage into a space for self-definition, argument, and display. That structure now feels especially resonant in an era shaped by front-facing cameras, personal branding, and the constant performance of identity online.
Man’s work is part of a broader surge. Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet has been touring since September and has already logged 13 international presentations, with at least 10 more planned in cities including New Delhi, Brisbane, and Los Angeles. Joshua Citarella, known primarily as a critic and artist, brought a live taping of Doomscroll into the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Mackenzie Thomas has also drawn sold-out crowds with I Said What I Said (2026), presented in Los Angeles, London, and New York.
What links these projects is not just format, but fluency. Many of the artists involved have substantial online followings, and the performance-lecture gives them a way to translate that digital presence into a live setting without abandoning its logic. The result is a hybrid form that can feel intimate, didactic, self-aware, and strangely familiar all at once.
The genre is not new. Robert Morris helped popularize performance-lectures in the 1960s, and his 21.3 (1964), in which he lip-synced an essay by Erwin Panofsky, remains a key reference point. Later criticism of Morris’s 1994 retrospective, including Roberta Smith’s description of it as “weirdly unconnected” and overly “pedantic,” only underscores how unsettled the category has long been.
That instability is part of the point. Performance-lectures keep testing where art ends and explanation begins, and in the process they reveal how closely contemporary culture now ties authorship to visibility, voice, and the act of being watched.
