From time to time somebody comes along and asks that annoying question, "What is art?" Nobody wants to think about the answer because, well, doesn't that take the fun out of it? Art is for thinking about life, not the other way around, right?

Not for everybody. Comedian Andy Kaufman provides a prime, and too-often forgotten, example. When not portraying a cutesified Eartern European as Latka on TV's Taxi, the late Kaufman crafted wildly anarchistic "comic" stunts that kept people perpetually on-edge about the relationship between performer and audience. I remember seeing Kaufman disturbingly lose his temper on an episode of the ABC live comedy show Fridays, then come back a week later to apologize, announcing he had become a born-again Christian and singing a boringly lovy-dovy song with his "wife." It seemed very, very real -- but it all turned out to be fake.

Kaufman's intention, I presume (since he never revealed it to anybody), was to make us look at the false cameraderie and warmth generated by professional TV and stage personalities. He wanted people to ask, "Is any of TV's reality really real?" And he succeeded, though not without ruffling a great many feathers, including his own. An inquisitive article about Kaufman's strange, violent wrestling shenanigans details just how well he succeeded in blurring the boundaries between art and life.

Other performers find less confrontational ways to make us re-think our realities. One such person was Charles Kuralt, the recently-deceased TV personality and author who made it his business to discover parts of America that you can't find in tourist guides. Kuralt, like Will "I never met a man I didn't like" Rogers of decades earlier, realized that people are just as interesting, if not moreso, than the places they inhabit. That sounds like a piety, but as this writer explains, Kuralt lived that sentiment, setting an inspiring example for would-be travelers who might esteem geography over local personality and tradition.

So how do other artists challenge the norms of art's form? If their medium is visual, they might begin by scrapping the ideas of ownership and authorship and mailing out their work for free, thereby divorcing it from the snooty confines of galleries and auctions. That's just what a number of "mail artists" have been doing. An article gives their premise -- that it's the process, not the end result, that matters -- a full examination. The conclusion? Perhaps art about art isn't so annoying after all, as long as it keeps asking questions worth answering.