Art of the Pub

Yara El-Sherbini, A Pub Quiz, 2009. Live art, duration 60 minutes. Performance at Fiddlesticks Pub, NY. Courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects.

My latest Gastro-Vision post on the Art21 blog features artist Yara El-Sherbini:

Yara El-Sherbini has used pubs as a site for her work for the past three years. In the U.K., where the artist is based, pub quizzes, or trivia nights are enormously popular. (According to Wikipedia, it has been estimated that more than 22,000 regular quizzes take place across the country every week.) In short, the game requires groups of roughly six to ten people to form teams. The evening quizmaster poses a series of questions, which are broken into rounds, and teams respond using a provided answer sheet. The results are scored, and the team with the highest count is usually awarded a prize. El-Sherbini has adopted this interactive entertainment format for her performance, A Pub Quiz, which she staged in the United States for the first time earlier this month.

Read the entire piece here.