Marina Abramović valuation
Sat silently at a table in MoMA for three months and let strangers sit opposite her.
Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade in 1946 and has spent a career testing what a body will tolerate in front of an audience.
What a work by Marina Abramović is worth
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Bio
Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade in 1946 and has spent a career testing what a body will tolerate in front of an audience. The early work is the most severe — Rhythm 0 in 1974 left her passive with seventy objects and an invited public — and the long collaboration and relationship with Ulay produced a body of joint work that ended with the two of them walking the Great Wall of China from opposite ends. The Artist Is Present at MoMA in 2010, three months seated opposite whoever sat down, is the piece that made her famous well beyond the art world.
The difficulty for a market is that the primary work is performance, which cannot be owned. What is traded is the residue: photographs of performances, video editions, objects and relics used in the work, and a body of editioned prints. Each behaves differently, and the question of what a given photograph is — a vintage exhibition print, a later edition, one of a series, signed or estate-stamped — governs the value entirely. Documentation from the gallery or the artist's studio is essential and should never be separated from the work.
Belgrade, Rhythm 10 and Balkan Baroque
Abramović studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970 and did postgraduate work in Zagreb, and her first performance, Rhythm 10, with ten knives and two tape recorders, was in Edinburgh in 1973. She moved to Amsterdam in 1976 and met Ulay there; their works together included Rest Energy of 1980 and Nightsea Crossing, performed twenty-two times between 1981 and 1987.
Balkan Baroque, in which she scrubbed thousands of bloody cow bones over four days, won her the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997. In 2005 she re-performed works by other artists in Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim, in 2007 she founded the Marina Abramović Institute, and in 2023 the Royal Academy in London gave her a retrospective.
The Rhythm series, the relation works and 1,545 sitters
The Rhythm series of 1973 and 1974 pushed the body to the point of collapse. In Rhythm 5 she lay inside a burning star and lost consciousness; in Rhythm 2, in Zagreb, she took drugs given to catatonic and schizophrenic patients; and in Rhythm 0, in Naples, she stood for six hours beside 72 objects, from a rose to a loaded gun, which the public could use on her as they chose. With Ulay came the relation works: running into each other for an hour in Relation in Space, driving 365 laps of a museum in Relation in Movement, and sitting back to back for sixteen hours, tied together by their hair, in Relation in Time.
The Artist Is Present, part of the largest exhibition of performance in MoMA's history and curated by Klaus Biesenbach, ran from 14 March to 31 May 2010. She sat for 736 hours and 30 minutes and faced 1,545 sitters, among them Lou Reed, Björk and Ulay, who appeared without warning early in the run. She calls herself the grandmother of performance art.
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