In the End, It Was All About You
by Jerry Saltz



Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art. For the past two months, Marina Abramovic’s large-scale 40-year retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, "The Artist Is Present" -- featuring Abramovic herself, seated in queenly fashion in the museum’s atrium, nude performers re-creating her past work, and lots of audience participation -- has turned the usually introspective institutional sphere into an existential circus of bizarre self-help.

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