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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