My checking of the NYT on weekends is somewhat iffy, so I missed this piece about the Marina Abramovic retrospective at MoMA until Lawrence mentioned it.
…a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days.
More:
Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition — generating headlines like “Squeezy Does It” in The New York Post — is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them.
And:
Henk Abma, a former Dutch Reformed Church pastor who said he had followed Ms. Abramovic’s work for 30 years, began his visit by spending half an hour sitting across from the artist herself, who is installed at a table in the museum’s atrium, where she will sit silently all day, every day, barely moving, for the entire run of the show. (The performance will add up to more than 700 hours of sitting if she can complete it.)
Here’s a link to MoMA’s webpage about the exhibition. I find it interesting that the NYT refers to the artist as “Abramovic” and MoMA refers to her as “Abramović”.