Do we like Marina Abramović?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful in her recent record and some real good, but one clumsy remark about Aboriginal people and some questions over her institute's money.
Abramović was born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, and has described a harsh, violent childhood. She came up through the Belgrade art academy and became one of the best-known performance artists going, famous for pushing her body to its limits in front of audiences. Her 2010 piece The Artist Is Present is the one most people remember.
Her early work was brutal, but her recent focus is the crowd. In 2026 she told Reuters the public is “sick and tired (of) just looking at art”, and that visitors must complete the work by taking part. Her Venice show is built on that idea: beds, crystals and bones that you lie on or touch.
The messiest chapter was in 2016, when an excerpt from her memoir described Aboriginal Australians in the 1970s as looking like “dinosaurs”. She first blamed an early, uncorrected proof, then apologised. The passage was cut from the printed book. Indigenous artist Christian Thompson, whom she mentored, publicly defended her, calling it clumsy wording and not a racially motivated attack.
The "satanist" stuff was a smear aimed at her. In 2016 right-wing outlets seized on a leaked email invitation to a Spirit Cooking dinner, a donor reward for her institute's fundraiser. She said it was a normal dinner with no blood, and reporting says the politician the email was addressed to never attended. It says nothing about her, and we've given it no weight.
On the harm check, honestly, the record is thin. We found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, no conspiracy theorising and no culture-war grift. We also didn't turn up a recent statement from her either way on trans people. Against that sits the diary line, which she apologised for, and which has stayed an isolated one.
The good stuff is real. In 2022 she restaged The Artist Is Present as an auction for Ukraine, with all proceeds going to the cause, saying “It's all of us” and that she could only act with her own tools. The blemishes are of the artist-world kind: critics have questioned her institute raising over $660,000 without ever getting a permanent building, and her pricey wellness workshops and skincare line.