Mark Berndt

USC School of Dramatic Arts Dean Madeline Puzo

What's in a name? Would that which we call the USC School of Theatre by any other name smell as sweet?

Sweeter, apparently, or so it might seem from the announcement this week by the esteemed acting school that the institution will henceforth be officially known as the USC School of Dramatic Arts.

For a school that has produced a roster of distinguished, marquee alumni including Forest Whitaker, Deborah Ann Woll, Tate Donovan, Swoosie Kurtz, Kyra Sedgwick, Eric Stoltz and LeVar Burton, the rechristening immediately raised the question of what connotations the phrase "dramatic arts" might encompass that the word "theater" (or "theatre," as the school spelled it) didn't already cover?

An outside observer might point out the similarity between the name switch and that of its richer and more famous sister school of film, which changed its name from the School of Cinema-Television to the School of Cinematic Arts in 2006 and five months later received a whopping $175 million endowment from director George Lucas (class of '67). Cynics from the region's struggling stage community might sadly shake their heads at what might be implied by the ominously literal elimination of the word "theater."

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Andrea Fraser in her fake guided tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989. Performance art? Yes.

Are Lady Gaga and Mitt Romney performance artists? The mainstream press has said so, and there's not much to stop them. As an artistic practice, performance art is what happens when an event or action is framed for an audience. Which means it could be anything, really. So what distinguishes self-aware mass entertainment or political events from, um, art?

To prepare us for the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art festival, which begins today, we asked Andrea Fraser for help. Her most famous performances tease the everyday out of the cliqueish confines of institutional art, like her fake guided tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 or the videotaped sexual encounter with a collector who paid Fraser $20,000 to be part of a work of art in 2003. She could be the world's sexiest performance artist.

In advance of her new work for West of Rome Public Art -- a staged performance of a feminist radio dialogue -- we asked Fraser to explain the discipline.

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