Marina Abramovic's retrospective The Artist Is Present opened at the Museum of Modern Art on March 14, 2010. The exhibition surveyed and reperformed decades of Abramovic's body-based and endurance work, while the artist herself sat silently in MoMA's atrium, inviting visitors one at a time to sit opposite her. Contemporary accounts describe the performance as running from the opening through May 31 and lasting seven hours a day during museum hours. It became a rare case in which performance art entered a mass public conversation, amplified by long visitor lines, online circulation of participant portraits, and the widely seen opening-night encounter with Ulay. The show also raised lasting questions about re-performance, museum labor, spectatorship, vulnerability, and the institutionalization of ephemeral art.
The exhibition made durational performance a central, widely recognized museum form.
