John Fare
called John Fahey in some accounts
John Fare (sometimes John Charles Fare or John Fahey or John Faré) is a fictional performance artist who allegedly used robotic surgery to remove parts of his body onstage as part of his act. His final performance was allegedly suicide by beheading. The story originated in 1968 and is generally considered an urban legend.
Sources for story
The original version was "The Hand" by N.B. Shein, published in Insect Trust Gazette in 1968. In November 1972, Tim Craig published an embellished version of Shein's original story in reply to a letter to the editor of Studio International. The reader was inquiring about an artist named Fahey who ended his career by having his head amputated onstage.
In Craig's embellished version of Shein's original, John Charles Fare was born in 1936 in Toronto and attended Forest Hill College. In 1959 he moved to London to study architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, but soon left to live in Copenhagen. He was briefly held in a mental health facility for exposing himself in public at performances. After his release, he was re-arrested for gluing objects to a car.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John Fare” is called John Fahey in some accounts. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Fare and called, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “called John Fahey in some accounts” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17013193. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1972, 1936 and 1959.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “John Fare” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.