Fresh Links!

by Art Fag City on June 1, 2010 Fresh Links!

Art Review – ‘Marina Abramovic – The Artist Is Present’ – At MoMA, a Performance Artist Endures – NYTimes.com

Pre-Artist-is-Present: The whole business is another act of self-enshrinement in the art world's ego Olympics, and that's not interesting. Divas are a dime a dozen, and I don't trust charisma. More interesting, because it ties in with her impulse to conserve a possibly unconservable art form, is the way “The Artist Is Present” attempts to control time, hers and ours.

I have no idea what her experience of sitting in that atrium for all those hours will be; there has to be some serious agony involved, which is where she hooks up with her implacably daredevil younger self. But my guess is that her presence will have a demonstrable effect on visitors to the museum; that it will slow them down, get them out of drive-by looking mode.

And every now and then someone will slip into that chair across from her — that's what it's there for — and spend some time exchanging stares, or energy, or going blank, or thinking, maybe for the first time, about that hard, high-flown, funny word “endure.”

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