Marina Abramovic Quotes
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Once you live in New York, you can't live anywhere else. Living in Paris is like going in slow motion. It's so bourgeois. I get so bored.
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I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.
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I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.
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Because of technology, we don't develop telepathy. We don't use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why?
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You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.
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Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
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All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.
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I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'
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Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.
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It's very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something - like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child - and if you don't follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.
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I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself.
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I used to have a recurring dream where I was at a party in a country house, surrounded by the same people each evening. Everyone would be singing and dancing and after a while I came to know the people; though, of course, they never really existed.
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The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind-changing.
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Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.
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I don't know anything about the afterlife because I haven't been there yet.
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Americans don't like European movies.
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You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.
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If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference.
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Artists should never think of themselves as an idol. Fame is a side effect of one's work.
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To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.
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I don't do husbands. I don't do children.
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Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.
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In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.
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The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic. Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre.