So incase you hadn’t been keeping up with Shia LaBeouf’s most recent antics, he spent the last 24 hours in an elevator at Oxford University as part of a performance art piece called #Elevate.

The voluntary act, which was carried out either side of a talk he gave at the University with friends and collaborators Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner, was live streamed and just shows Shia talking about general life stuff and art and shit.

But Shia being Shia, something weird had to happen and of course it did — helped along by a student claiming he is a “performance artist”. After queuing for over seven hours to do the meet and greet, the guy asks Shia if he can punch him in the face:

I’m a performance artist. Can you help me with completion of my next piece by punching me in the face?

Shia is a bit taken aback — at first he hesitates and then decides that a punch to the face might be a little bit too far, so he settles with a slap instead. You can hear the whole conversation in the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYw3VBnbq6w

Can I just take a moment to hate on performance art students right now? While most of us uni-goers had to slave away writing 30,000 words on ‘psychoanalytical literary theory in modernist texts’, this guy is going to get away with this shit as his final project with a few hundred words contextualising the whole thing.

I wonder why Shia couldn’t go through with fully punching him in the face? Must have been too sober and felt a bit shy — not like the time he head-butted a guy in a London pub.