Harriet Richardson, a performance artist who has gone on 100 dates in a day and staged a faux romance with Mark Zuckerberg, says comedy is terrified of being called art. Meanwhile, Lauren Michele Jackson writes in The New Yorker that fans diagnosing Ariana Grande's body as symptomatic of an eating disorder perform their own kind of unwanted curation: the public as amateur pathologist, the celebrity body as open-source text. Both stories are about who gets to interpret a woman's physical performance, and who profits from that interpretation.
When Diagnosis Becomes Audience Participation
Jackson's piece argues that diagnosis offers fans a sense of legibility and control, a way to make meaning from a body that keeps changing without explanation. Richardson's practice works the same territory from the opposite angle: she stages absurdist social rituals precisely to defamiliarize the scripts audiences use to decode women's behavior. Getting tattooed ahead of a stand-up show is not incidental. It is the work. The body is the medium. The audience's discomfort at not knowing whether to laugh or gasp is the point. A 2021 paper in Body and Society by Lavis and colleagues found that public eating disorder discourse consistently collapses the distinction between concern and surveillance, with social media accelerating the slide from one to the other.
The Performance Frame as Protective Shield
What Richardson has that Grande doesn't is the frame. Call it art, and suddenly the rules shift. The audience consents to ambiguity. But Grande exists in pop, where the frame is always already consumption, and the audience has never agreed to sit with discomfort. Mieke Marple and Francesca Sonara have written about clowning as a response to alienation, and there's something clarifying in that framing here: both Richardson and Grande are performing in traditions that historically use the body to absorb the crowd's anxiety. The difference is only in whether the performer controls the stage.