City Pages, a Minneapolis/St. Paul weekly newspaper, asked writers to select 1997's "artists of the year." Greil Marcus, author of books on Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley (and our own Elvis section), nominated the Ramsey family.  Harper's excerpted this piece as "Performance Art's New Standard."  In this selection, Marcus sees the swirl of the news media and real life as the stuff of theater. 

From the start, John and Patsy Ramsey's brilliant performance piece "Death of a Princess" rewrote the rules of the form. The combination of vulgarity (a killing on Christmas night? Come on!) and austerity (the cold, steely, statue-like refusal to submit to police interviews until the rules of that form had been rewritten) would by itself be enough to lift the work far beyond such temporarily diverting but ultimately ordinary affairs as Susan Smith's "White Mom/Black Stranger" or the generic, small-market variations on the classic "Man Kills Family, Self." 

But what really marked the murder of six-year-old bottle-blonde JonBenet Ramsey as a ground-breaking art statement was its commitment to Time as the fundamental element of an art form that has been more celebrated for its variations on such conventional tropes as Public Grief and Media Manipulation (as the New York Times put it in a hilarious apercu, the Ramseys mounted a defense team that sounds like a defense lawyers' Christmas carol: "eight lawyers, four publicists, three private investigators, two handwriting analysts and one retired F.B.I. profiler"). 

The Ramseys have managed to command an audience (for the once marginalized and mocked field of performance art) of unprecedented size and diversity for an entire year -- and with no end to the piece in sight. If one looks closely at the, as it were, "building blocks" or Lincoln Logs of the work, one can conclude that the piece began, in terms of preproduction, with or even before JonBenet Ramsey's birth; that is, with the decision to fashion a name for the conceivably sex-selected offspring out of the first and middle names of her father. 

The daring is stunning: making the murder victim into a veritable part-object of the father, instantly throwing suspicion on him as a Performer acting out his own suicide through murder. And yet, as with so much else in the work, the twist only tangled the viewer into a greater knot. It's this -- the brazen placing of drop-dead clues in plain sight, and then, through silence more than any other aesthetic strategy, making the clues mute in their turn, slapping the audience in the face and then convincing the audience that no such act ever took place -- that seals the work. 
 
Certainly, there have been moments when one or the other of the Ramseys (but never both at the same time) has seemed less than certain in his or her role. John Ramsey emerging from the basement of his house holding his dead daughter not cradled in his arms (some cliches cannot be altered if a piece is to hold its shape) but held away from his body like the corpse of a wild animal betrayed a squeamishness real artists learn to put behind themselves (as John Ramsey since has); Patsy Ramsey's declaration, after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, that "my daughter" was "America's people's, princess" could only be seen as an unseemly attempt to gain an even larger audience for a work that was perhaps beginning to lose a certain momentum. 
 
But that is quibbling; again, the Ramseys' relentless belief in and single-minded commitment to the passage of time has elevated their performance above that of their colleagues, their imitators, and even their extra-genre media representations (the versions of the Ramseys' piece that ran on NYPD Blue and Homicide were prosaic and obvious by comparison). They have waited us all out, ensuring that they will never be forgotten, by creating a work that will never end. 

-- Greil Marcus, from "John and Patsy Ramsey," in Dec. 31, 1997 issue of City Pages. Excerpted in Harper's, April 1998, pp. 35-6. 

 
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