Presentation Response:Happenings

what would kaprow have thought about recreations of the happenings? keep in mind the d.i.y. attitude with directions so that anyone can create the art piece, versus the spontaneity and impermanence of happenings.
also, what are the consequences of merging life and art? if everything we did was perceived as art, would value of art in our world diminish or grow?

I think it's safe to assume Kaprow would have been very proud. The idea of happenings being scripted seemed to invite reenactment. I think that recreation would have been favorable as well, because it could be viewed as a variant or evolution of the original happening. Later on it seemed that Kaprow was more concerned with the intricacies of life, "And the work itself, the action, the kind of participation, was as remote from anything artistic as the site was."-Kaprow.

I don't know how the Kaprow concerned with small parts would have felt about these being recreated. It seemed that the concept of space was important to Kaprow's work. Very few of his Happenings were actually recorded. They exist only in that specific moment. This is different from other art, say a painting, where the space and emotion are tied to a tangible artifact.

In terms of merging art and life, I don't think the two are separate to begin with. There are distinct ties between the two that offer symbiotic assistance. In the "what-if" scenario of everything being art, it is hard to say what would happen. The initial answer is everything would be diminished, but is that true? Value isn't assigned to art in a specific way, so it's hard to say that value would drop because of a certain thing. Humans crave unique and individual "things." There was an episode of a Nickelodeon TV show called "Fairly Odd Parents" in which everyone was turned into monochrome blobs, completely indistinguishable from each other visually. Even then, characters in the show defined themselves as being "the grayest" or "slightly less gray." I can not imagine a scenario where every thing created is valued at the same level as "art." Not to say that everything doesn't have value, but even now within the classification of "art" there are different dimensions and facets to each piece.