Happening

A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere, and are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned, but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer. Henceforth, the interactions between the audience and the artwork makes the audience, in a sense, part of the art.

In the later sixties, perhaps due to the depiction in films of hippie culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any gathering of interest, from a pool hall meetup or a jamming of a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal party.

Read more about Happening:  Festivals As Happenings, Further Reading

Famous quotes containing the word happening:

    One of the things I’ve discovered in general about raising kids is that they really don’t give a damn if you walked five miles to school. They want to deal with what’s happening now.
    Patty Duke (20th century)

    I don’t think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial—or is it post- colonial?—cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it—assisted by the English language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.
    Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)

    Parenting is a profoundly reciprocal process: we, the shapers of our children’s lives, are also being shaped. As we struggle to be parents, we are forced to encounter ourselves; and if we are willing to look at what is happening between us and our children, we may learn how we came to be who we are.
    Augustus Y. Napier (20th century)