The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gapfest, Naked Doorway Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, April 28, 2010.

On today's program, the performance artist Marina Abramovich.

The 201 episode of South Park, Censored, and HBO presents Al Pacino as Jack Kovorkian. Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. And our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Steve. And also joining us today is Lisa Tharp. Hello, Steve. Lisa, would you say that it was fortuitous or serendipitous that we ran into yesterday at the Marina Abramovich exhibit or both?

Both fortuitous and serendipitous.

I agree with you on that.

I know you mostly as Dana Stevens' friend, but you're more than just that.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. I am also the author of Peas for Please, a bestiary of manners. So, you know, if you don't mind your

peas and cues, be careful. The animals will get you? Or I will.

I'm just going to throw in, because Lisa's being too modest, that it's a wonderful children's book that she wrote and our friend Ali Bauerhempore illustrated.

And Dana's fabulous husband was the art director, designer.

Fantastic. And the reason you join us today is we ran into you fortuitously and serendipitously at this exhibit at the

moment the Museum of Modern Art yesterday. As a quick backgrounder on it, this was the first time

Dana told me and I trust her, that it was the first time that MoMA had engaged with performance

art. They did it in a big way. They brought in, I think it's fair to say, a legend in the medium.

A woman named Marina Abramovich,

who was born in Yugoslavia, her became prominent in the 1970s behind the iron curtain.

As the exhibit notes say, her body is object, subject, and medium of her work all at once.

We went and saw the exhibit yesterday. Dana, it's become notorious for one specific part of it. Why don't we describe that and then we'll branch out? Yeah, this was sort of the peg that made us decide to do it, although there's so much more to talk about with this exhibit. I can't wait to start a conversation about it. But yeah, I guess it's the presence of nude bodies in the exhibit that's been the subject of controversy and attention and drawn a lot of

people to the show and definitely charges the atmosphere at the show in a way that, you know,

most trips to MoMA aren't charged. So it's not just the nude doorway standards that have gotten

...