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.

Mary Coble is a dedicated artist whose 2005 performance piece, Note to Self, involved being tattooed with the names of 436 gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered people who died as a result of hate crimes.   The performance took 12 hours.

On the one hand, wow. On the other hand, is this art?

Here is a  parallel, under the category of Too Much Information:

Late at night, I like to pick at my legs. “Like” isn’t the right word. It’s more, I have to pick at my legs. This has been going on long enough that I know it’s a form of OCD because I don’t want to do it but I do it anyway.

It started with a tweezer and a couple of ingrown hairs. I hate shaving my legs but I hate ingrown hairs even more. Soon, you get a little scab and the next night, you need to   pick off the scab. Pretty soon, it’s war. My legs are a battlefield and no one is winning. I stopped for a few  months  but then started again.

I know this is a response to intolerable anxiety. I know I should wear mittens at night, or take up knitting or wear high boots until I get into bed.

Nevertheless, I haven’t managed to stop.

Mary Coble has inspired me to ask the question: IS THIS ART?!? How about if I call this a six month performance piece, with my husband the sole spectator??

I think that having only one spectator makes it super arty!

I already feel kind of important about my work!

What do you think?

Vanessa Beecroft is an “artist” whose trip to Sudan is documented in a new film called “The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins.”

Beecroft evidently had no idea how damning this documentary would be. According to one review:

The doc cluster-bombs her faddish fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist. The film is brutally effective because it lets Beecroft hang herself with damaging quotes and appalling behavior.

Beecroft explains that the adoption will be” not just fetishization of the blacks. It will be a beginning of a relationship with that country.”

Ha.

In the film’s most disturbing scene, sisters from the orphanage try to stop her from stripping the children nude inside their abbey for an elaborate photo shoot.

Oh god, I can’t go on. You’ll have to read the reviews yourself. If you do a google search for images, you will see that this woman has been up to no good for a long time. She has an “artistic relationship ” of some kind with Kanye West, which is bound to reflect badly on both of them when the dust settles.

What a fucking, fucking cunt! She is everything I hate about everything, and then some.

In the current New Yorker, there is a long profile of the performance artist Marina Abramovic that caused me to wonder: Is my life actually Art?

Abramovic has been provoking and shocking people for thirty years. Next week, MOMA is hosting a retrospective of her work, with actors performing some of her most famous “pieces.” That alone is controversial; even her former collaborator and lover, Uwe Laysiepen, thinks it’s fundamentally dishonest to recreate performance art.

Most of Abramovic’s art has involved subjecting herself to pain and humiliation (a genre called ordealism.) Reading about it, you can’t help but feel that this art is beyond parody. My favorite piece is the one where she scrubbed a roomful of rotting, maggot-infested cow bones on her hands and knees, sobbing while video’s of her parents were projected on the walls of the “space.”

In another early piece, she stood still while the audience was offered a wide array of implements with which to torment her.

At MOMA, she will mount a work called “The Artist is Present,” in which she will sit still at a table for ten hours a day, staring into space, throughout the retrospective. Audience members may choose to sit opposite her at the table.

Here is the thing: I personally sit staring into space for MORE THAN TEN HOURS A DAY! I never thought of this as Art, but now I’m mulling it over. Maybe it is Art,   a sort of confrontation with time and eternity, a refusal to interact with gainful employment, and therefore a statement about the subjugation of of modern Man, I mean Women.

Read the article in the New Yorker if you possibly can. It’s a transformative experience that doesn’t even require you to get up off your ass!