How many times have you said to yourself, “I feel like I’m in a movie right now”? The strange twists of life can seem so dramatic, preposterous, and stereotypical that they feel fake—made up by some hack writer. And yet they’re real, and the “hack writer” seems suspiciously akin to God, the Universe, or Fate. Oscar Wilde famously wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.” While counterintuitive, this is probably true. For it’s harder to create art that resembles life than to live. And when you live, you can’t help but imitate art. Why is this?
Today, I’d like to share an interesting modern novel in which the protagonist’s life keeps imitating art, despite his stubborn intention to leave art behind. When art imitates life, that’s normal and natural, since people create art in response to the realities of life. But when life imitates art, what does it mean?
What happens when life imitates art and art imitates life?
In the 2024 novel Blue Ruin, by Hari Kunzru, the protagonist is a down-on-his-luck, middle-aged grocery delivery driver and former art school student. But is this protagonist, Jay, really as down on his luck as he initially seems? Sure, he has Covid (this is a Covid-era novel). Sure, he lost his girlfriend to his art-school buddy, and has recently stumbled across the two of them again, and there are inauspicious vibes. Sure, he lives out of his car and is poor as can be.
But as the story progresses and takes the reader into Jay’s past, we learn that Jay has a bad habit of self-sabotage. And his self-sabotage follows a strange, circular pattern.
Jay repeatedly tries to quit doing art. But his attempts to quit doing art are highly performative, and they come across, to those in the art world “know,” as high performance art. Jay, it seems, could have chosen a lucrative career as a performance artist. Instead, he turns down opportunities to be paid for performance art, and instead enacts elaborate performances without pay. And he does this not because he wants to be an artist, but precisely because he wants to signal that he is done with art.
But this only increases his fan base.
And so, Jay’s life imitates art in the only way that life can imitate art: inadvertently. And his art, being performance art, naturally imitates life.
What is performance art?
What is performance art? Well, first, let me define art. And by art, I mean visual art, literature, music, and so on.
What is art?
Art is the consolation prize when you don’t get what you want.
Art changes your perspective from “this sucks” or “this is ordinary” to “this is amazing” or “this is cosmic.”
Art creates meaning where there was no meaning before, and it creates no meaning (or new meaning) where there was meaning before.
Art is religion for the rebellious and fierce individual.
What is performance art?
Performance art is living life, for a period of time that can range from minutes to years, in a particular way, to create a new perspective among yourself and your audience about what the period of lived life means.
Performance art is what happens when life imitates art and art imitates life, taken to its fullest extreme.
Examples of when life imitates art and art imitates life #1: A major life transition
Have you ever experienced a major change that was so dramatic that it seemed as if you had stepped into an entirely new life? It could be a career change, a move to a new city or country, becoming a parent, going to war, or coming home from war. In Blue Ruin, the protagonist Jay describes meeting his future girlfriend and lifelong love like this:
“There are breaks, moments of transition when we leave behind not just places or times, but whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return.”
Meeting a woman named Alice changes Jay’s life so much that it’s as if, he implies, he had engaged in interplanetary or interdimensional spacetime travel.
When this is read in context, Jay is clearly thinking about his personal feelings about Alice. But Jay is a performance artist. He somehow, through language, turns his relationship into something bigger, something that can be viewed by others—not just himself—as amazing and cosmic, despite its seeming banality. Note that this is not romance. This is not about feeling sentimental and in love. This is about transforming ordinary life into one extraordinary lifelong experience, through art.
Further, within the scope of the novel, Jay’s thought could also be interpreted as referring to his performance art, the dramatic scenes he purposely enacts: Locking himself in a room, reemerging. Locking himself out of England, reemerging. And then there are the dramatic scenes he accidentally enacts. Locking himself out of the art world, reemerging.
Examples of when life imitates art and art imitates life #2: Ordinary life as performance art
In middle age, Jay reflects on his erstwhile career as a performance artist, and he wonders whether he still is one. He wonders whether the performance has been continuing all this time, unbeknownst to him:
“Did I really think time was lost if it wasn’t converted into art? No, not anymore. The people I had known; the things I had built or repaired; the scars on my body—they were real. They had been my life. Those years weren’t lost years.”
He’s saying that during all those years when he wasn’t trying to be a performance artist, it’s okay to think of them as not being art. As a middle-aged man, he no longer needs art as he seemed to need it when he was younger.
But the edges are blurry. Where does performance art end and “real life” begin? Can’t all of life be art, when thought of as art? Does Jay have control over the meaning of his own life, or is the art world now in control?
Does life imitate art? Does art imitate life?
Yes. Yes, of course.
Art is all about a perspective shift, and an artist’s job is to prompt and nurture that shift in others. The extent of the shift can be equated to the greatness of the artist—at least after you factor out money and fame and everything else that’s not art.
Life imitates art every time someone has a perspective shift and thinks, “whoa, that was weird and kinda cool.”
Art imitates life every time the above happens—and whoever it happened to, taking on the mantle of an artist, conveys it to others.
In Blue Ruin, Kunzru seems to imply that we are all performance artists. Or at least we all can be, with the help of a perspective shift, along with communication to others in some artistic medium, which could be life itself.
He also seems to imply that we can’t escape who we are.
Or can we? Read to the end and decide for yourself about Jay and whether he’s now a performance artist or just an ordinary guy.
Is your life performance art?
Featured in this blog post: Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru Buy it now
