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• • • Foreword to the Revised Edition At last, I live up to my subtitle. This updated edition takes the collection to the end of the century and beyond, and I've been able to include more (but far from all) of the artists who did important work during that fecund period of performance art history. Revisions actually begin with the "Wired" section, formerly titled "Unplugged ." (We are all now definitely plugged.) And each section is again arranged chronologically. I left The Village Voice in 2003, and during my last years there, I worked with new rules and restrictions on what I could cover. Reporting on some incandescent one-time-only event-practically a definition for what I used to do-was no longer allowed. One piece I've included here, for example, "The Statue of Libertines," was written for the Voice but never printed. It's about a trip Annie Sprinkle made to Liberty Island with a gaggle of sex workers, drag kings, performance artists, and other provocateurs. They were all nearly arrested, and I was the only reporter present, but Annie's show at P.S.122 had closed, so there was no longer anything for readers to go see. In journalistic parlance, I had no "news peg." The piece was killed. Performance art does not jibe well with the concept of the news peg. Of course, the field has changed since the first edition of this book appeared , becoming more institutionalized as the Voice became more conventional . I have more to say about those changes in a new epilogue to this edition, "The End of the Edge." For now, suffice it to say that the devastation of the art margin I described and lamented in 1993 continued apace. New York City September 2007 ...

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