So how, then, can we separate meaningful performance from the flatline and lazy? “Bad performance art is a prescriptive, single-channel vision,” says Soda. “Good performance can be subtle or over the top… but not like, someone pouring chocolate all over themselves and screaming. It has to be self-aware.” Olson suggests the distinction lies within the intentions of the artist rather than any objective read of the quality or format of the performance. Good performance art “creates a mood and a moment to collectively take an audience to a space where we consider the edges of our expectations and our highs and lows,” she says. “Bad work is making a bunch of assumptions about who’s in on your clever inside jokes with yourself…in a way that you can’t see is hubristic.”

Opacity and the capacity for multiple reads emerges as the key characteristic of performance done right. So how does the internet help out with that? Olson’s American Idol Audition Training Blog project suggests that its broad reception was independent of whether or not her audience “knew or cared that I was doing a performance art piece,” she explains. Soda’s read of the cybernetic free-for-all is somewhat more somber. “It’s cool to see activism on your news feed,” Soda says, “but then we have to ask ourselves, who rules these channels and what are they mediating?”