Shia LaBeouf: 'My life is performance art'

Actor Shia LaBeouf. Photo / Getty Images

Following a long list of modern stars who claim they meant for all those weird events to happen by means of self-expression, just when the world starts to notice they're acting strangely almost all of the time, Shia LaBeouf has claimed that his entire life thus far is "performance art".

This includes not only his plagiarising of graphic novelist Daniel Clowes' work for his short film HowardCantour.com, and his subsequent series of bizarre plagiarised apologies, but also, he says, his headbutting of a random man in a south London pub last week.

Coming out of public retirement to share the knowledge of his apparent project with his followers on Twitter, he posted on Saturday: "Performance art has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture.

"All art is either plagarisum [sic] or revolution & to be revolutionary in art today, is to be reactionary.

"In the midst of being embroiled in acts of intended plagiarism, the world caught me & I reacted.

"The show began. I became completely absorbed, oblivious to things around me."

The former Disney star went on to tell fans that his Twitter handle, @TheCampaignBook, represents "meta-modernist performance art", before claiming that his recent erratic behaviour has stirred a "broad cultural discussion that needs to be had about plagiarism in the digital age & celebrity/social media absurdity".

He ended his online confession with a reference to his fight with a fellow drinker at the Hobgolbin in London, which he signed off with the hashtag #StopHeadButting.

The incident, captured on camera last week, was sparked after the drinker apparently made some less than flattering remarks about his girlfriend Mia Goth's mother.

In the video, posted via TMZ on Friday, the 27-year-old star can be seen screaming into the man's ear before leaning in to give him a 'Glasgow kiss'.

LaBeouf and Goth starred together in Lars von Trier's typically controversial new movie, Nymphomaniac. Goth's mother apparently lives near to the Hobgoblin pub in South London.

However, LaBeouf has since deleted all reference to "performance art", and the fight, from his Twitter profile.

Whether that, too, is another part of his ongoing "modernist" project remains to be clarified. But the likelihood is LaBeouf's "retirement" will be anything but uneventful.

- Independent