Just as historians usefully identity precedents for monochrome or still life painting, so we can construct a pre-history for the flash mob. In nineteenth-century Italian opera’s crowd scenes and in numerous dancing scenes in Hollywood films, you see music animating urban life. Suddenly the crowd is brought together by a song. Then of course there’s the famous scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) in which the Yardbirds transfix a London club audience. Or the familiar scenes in which a diner is wished happy birthday by waiters and friends singing in a restaurant. And everyone knows the buskers in the subways and on the streets. Even if you usually only sing in the shower, in a flash mob, as in Franz Kafka’s “Nature Theater of Oklahama,” as presented in his unfinished novel Amerika, there’s a place for everyone who wants to participate.

The flash mob can be a response to urban alienation. Charles Baudelaire, George Simmel and Walter Benjamin described how people unknown to one another are packed together in the city. And Elias Canetti, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Sennett considered the political potential of these settings. The crowds at the Bastille in 1789 or in Moscow in Fall 1917 achieve self-consciousness as revolutionaries. But of course there are fascist mobs, too. A mob is often menacing, but the phrase ‘flash mob’ identifies a crowd whose power comes to nothing as soon as the music stops. There is, still, something inherently subversive in the very concept, if only because it is a community not licensed by the political authorities. In many YouTube videos, you can see spectators in a piazza or a train station become a group, united in their response to the performance. In authoritarian cultures such gatherings would be illegal political demonstrations. And in liberal societies, malls are policed.

Wasik’s interpretative concerns are sociological. He relates flash mobs to internet news manipulation and the online pop music scene. Mine, writing as an art critic, are with aesthetics. Like the Dresden cityscapes of Bernardo Bellotto, the images of central Paris by Camille Pissarro and the paintings of New York by Rackstraw Downes, flash mobs transform those cities into aesthetic settings. A concert usually has a publicly announced starting time. But if a Rossini aria were scheduled for performance by a flash mob for every Thursday afternoon in Grand Central Station, then the essential element of surprise would be gone. The actors in a performance on the stage are set physically apart from the viewer. But in a quasi-public space a flash mob deconstructs these spatial boundaries. The flash mob spectators are on stage, with the performers all around them.

Joachim Pissarro and I have described the myriad of art forms, what we call wild art, that can move from the outside world into the art museum. Graffiti, for example, originally a street art, is the basis for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings. We thought that the difference between art world art and wild art was purely conventional. And so in principle, we believed, any artwork can move into the museum. But flash mobs are a counterexample to that analysis because surprise of the audience is an essential element. A flash mob from Grand Central Station reconstructed to show regularly in the atrium of MoMA would cease to be a flash mob. It would become a mere performance work.

I first encountered an art world near-relation of the flash mob in 2008, Dara Friedman’s Musical, an exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, in the West Village. She made a forty-eight-minute-long video of hired non-professional performers photographed singing in the streets. Normally you probably walk down the street thinking about what you’ll do at your destination, looking at the store windows, or talking to a friend. And it’s natural when walking in public to be absorbed in a somewhat self-protective way. But you don’t expect to hear strangers singing. I was enthralled by Musical , which revealed the potential of urban performances. And I was amused to see that many New Yorkers ignored these conspicuous performers. A few, however, donated money, as if the singers were beggars. Friedman’s use of amateur performers and her use of surprise link Musical to the flash mob. But where Wasik envisaged a form novel performance art, she is concerned to use these performers to create a video work.

I long for the day when without warning I will encounter a flash mob while gallery going. To the best of my knowledge, there is as yet no PhD art history thesis or academic book on this enchanting art form. But perhaps this essay would inspire or provoke one.