Marina Abramović Made Me Cry (Unless You are Antony Hegarty)

April 30, 2010


Right now at New York's MoMA, Marina Abramović has a piece of art called "The Artist is Present" where you sit across from her at a table and don't say anything. That's it. It's free, it's all day, and you can sit as long as you'd like. Her psychic art powers of silent staring have, reports the Wall Street Journal, made people cry. As part of the piece, a portrait is taken of every participant by Abramović's collaborator Marco Anelli, which MoMA posts on its Flickr stream, along with how long the visitor sat. As Katie Notopoulos noted, a lot of these people were crying. So she began to cull those photos into a blog, Marina Abramović Made Me Cry. Even without the physical presence of the artist across the table, these photos themselves are quite powerful, especially the diversity of the people moved to tears. One person we noticed in MoMA's stream, dry-faced, is Antony and the Johnsons. He sat for eight minutes. Christiane Amanpour could only handle two.

Marina Abramović Made Me Cry (Unless You are Antony Hegarty)