Marina Abramovic, the self-proclaimed Grandmother of Performance Art, has published a memoir and is doing a lot of press to promote it.

In a recent interview, she described an average day. At 7:30, after breakfast, she calls her “lover,” an unnamed artist who lives in another country. She described her daily bath, using a pound of baking  soda and a pound of something I forgot (sea salt? Almond oil?) she makes some calls, cares for her cherished long hair, wraps herself in a big cashmere blanket, and prepares for another day of pampering herself and being famous.

At 69, she deserves a break.

All those years of brutalizing her body in the name of art, and torturing her patrons with silence, nudity, dramatic displays of fortitude and almost ecstatic humiliation, she has made her point about being an artist. Your art must be all-consuming, inseparable from your actual life.

At 69, it’s time to reflect, but not to put her clothes on. She will confront you with her mature, voluptuous body, the elderly Eve, Venus, and Mother Earth.

I can’t read her autobiography, unless it’s free and it comes with a mood altering leafy substance. But here’s some excerpts from a review in the New York Times:

A tolerance for a certain amount of pomposity is a prerequisite for keeping up with serious art. In “Walk Through Walls,” Ms. Abramovic pushes this tolerance to its limits.

And well beyond, it sounds like.

In one of her better-known video pieces, “The Onion” (1996), Ms. Abramovic ate a raw onion while complaining about her life in a voice-over. (“I’m tired of changing planes so often … museum and gallery openings, endless receptions.”) In this shallow and misconceived memoir, she takes that onion from her mouth and places it in ours.

Oh snap! Personally, I’ll be damned if I take her onion. I have my own onion.

It’s not hard to admire such a confident and tenacious figure, laboring away within the patriarchal confines of the international art scene. Her supreme faith in her own greatness, like Madonna’s, is surprisingly persuasive.

Even as she smugly reveals that she’s stopped buying clothes “because Ricardo [Tisci, creative designer of Givenchy] will bring me things to wear,” you have to admire her gigantic ego, and her childlike obliviousness.

You go girl, but cover up, okay?

photo: (c) Annie Liebovitz

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If you’ve always sensed some nothingness in the work of celebrated performance diva artist Marina Abramovic, you’ll be glad to know it’s official.

Discussing her new work at the Serpentine Gallery, her first since The Artist is Present, she says:

I had this vision of an empty gallery — nothing there.

So far, so good. So radical and avant garde! Her show is called  “512 Hours,” the amount of time she will be present at the gallery, where patrons will enter an empty room and do nothing, or something.

There is just me. And the public. It is insane what I try to do.

Oh Marina, you kook! You bring the nothing, and we love you for it! Well, I don’t, but whatever.The gallery’s curators have received a number of letters, accusing Abramovic and the gallery of failing to acknowledge the work of Mary Ellen Carroll, a New York-based conceptual artist who has been working on a project called “Nothing” since 1984, describing it as “an engagement with the public.”

The Serpentine’s curator admits that many artists (including John Cage and Yoko Ono) have explored the relationship between art and nothingness. The matter is far from settled but Abramovic has responded a bit defensively:

It’s not that I’m doing nothing — quite the opposite. It’s just that there is nothing except people in the space.

See, you idiots? You fucking philistines! Back off. Get out of her grille.

I like this paragraph about Marina, from a profile at CNN online: “She has danced with Jay Z in his music video, counts James Franco and Lady Gaga as loyal fans and friends, and was named as one of Time Magazine’s most influential people of 2014.”

I think it sums up her place in our culture, although I also believe there was a time when she was a genuine artist with something to say.

Meanwhile, if you want, you can watch her sell out to Adidas, below.