(Jenny Schlenzka, an associate curator at MoMA PS1, was a surprising standout; who knew?) "The Show Must Go On" is in obvious (and very French) conversation with the issues of antivirtuosic movement and artifice taken up by the Judson artists.
I want to be on the real sea, stuck out there with a company of actors experiencing all the absolute nightmares that you have when you try to shoot at sea.' " He was aware, he said, that his blend of reality and artifice "ends up being a combination that is not quite one thing or the other, but is its own thing".
In his second collection, Miller quietly disassembles everyday life, identifying the rhetoric, folly, expectation, and artifice that make up the world.
It is fair enough to deconstruct the inherent artifice of stand-up, but this compulsive picking at the seams of his own act is ultimately counterproductive.
Björk's voice sounds at the same time like that of a child and that of a seductive woman: visceral and guttural, a highly personal, easily recognisable voice, with rolling Rs and a heavy accent practically the opposite of the cleaned-up artifice of a classically trained singer.
After going to such lengths to create a realistic style, why mess it up with artifice?
They are the elect, precisely because they know how to keep up the artifice.
Yet for all the appeal of this approach, that factory worker and the university professor become players, as much bound up in artifice as Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy.
The first time that we sat down to talk, at a restaurant in Portland's loft-filled Pearl District, she said, "I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.
In one section, Houstoun reads out her own stage directions as she performs, not only pointing up the artifice of the material, but simultaneously playing with her anxieties about forgetting it.
