I love the way artist Steven Cohen discuss his:

thoughts on performance

I don’t actually know what the fuck performance art is, yet I’m brilliant at it. Does this mean that I’m a fraud. No! It simply proves that performance art is not a practice informed by theory … and that I’m honest and a little vain.

He also says:

Performance art is really about vegetarians eating blood and men fingering their cunts; it is art eating itself and art fucking itself for the first time every time.

and:

The vanity (read self-respect) is what I harness to let myself get vulnerable, get naked in public, get shamed. My form of performance art comes from a place I’ve never been to before, each time. It’s an attempt to understand something in the process of doing it. It’s about letting you see the work as I am making it. That takes a lot of trust for me as an artist.

You can read more about his view on performance art here.