“Performance art is all about context,” writes Howl star and forthcoming General Hospital costar James Franco in a new Wall Street Journal article. It’s called “A Star, a Soap and the Meaning of Art: Why An Appearance on General Hospital Qualifies as Performance Art.”

“If you bake some bread in a museum space it becomes art, but if you do it at home you’re a baker. Likewise, when I wear green makeup and fly across a rooftop in Spider-Man 3, I’m working as an actor, but were I to do the same thing on the subway platform, a host of possibilities would open up. Playing the Green Goblin in the subway would no longer be about creating the illusion that I am flying. It would be about inserting myself in a familiar space in such a way that it becomes stranger than fiction, along the lines of what I’m doing on General Hospital.”