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Bye Bye Abramović: Artist Closes Out In Style
By
Jen Carlson
Published Jun 2, 2010
Modified Jun 2, 2010
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By
Jen Carlson
Published Jun 2, 2010
Modified Jun 2, 2010
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Last night Marina Abramović and her VIPs gathered at MoMA for a closing celebration of the artist's retrospective there. Our invite must have gotten lost in the mail (it seems superfans like Paco Blancas and Josephine Decker also didn't earn their way in), but here's a look at who was in attendance, including Courtney Love and her new face.
The Gold Ball and the Golden Lips
, who sat across from her during "The Artist Is Present," was also there—the actor has enjoyed eating gold with the artist in the past, and we're told that for the event a dessert titled the Gold Ball was served as part of a performance piece after dinner. The Gold Ball recipe was given to Abramović by a Tibetan monastery, and "the practice of consuming a Gold Ball usually follows a long period of fasting and seclusion. In keeping with this tradition, the artist had planned a performance dessert piece in which the guests would apply a 24K golden leaf to their mouths before tasting the Gold Ball. By consuming the Gold Ball together with her guests, Abramović marked the end of her longest performance ever."
There was also a treat called Golden Lips that were cast from Abramović’s mouth—the mold was then poured with dark chocolate and the lips were dusted with edible 24K gold. Fancy! Also extravagant was Abramović’s attire—after wearing a robe through all 700-something hours of her performance she finally got to dress up with a custom-made outfit created from the skins of 101 snakes, a design inspired by one of her earlier works in which she put a snake on her head. But don't worry, according to the NY Times, all of the snakes died from natural causes.
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Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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