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Note to Self

Marina Abramović’s Method Blew Our Minds

Note to Self

WNYC Studios

Self-improvement, Tech, Note, Npr, Education, Public, Wnyc, Manoush, York, To, New, Self, Radio, Business, Technology, Relationships, City, Society & Culture, Zomorodi, Newtechcity

4.72.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2015

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why Marina Abramović, one of the world’s most famous performance artists, is making you sit in total silence for 30 minutes before a "magic" performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Today, we get a little weird with one of the world's most famous performance artists,

0:18.6

Marina Abramovich.

0:21.0

She'll explain her latest work, Goldberg, and also she'll explain the Marina Abramovich

0:26.6

method more generally.

0:29.2

It's about changing your behavior, how you use your technology to experience art in a

0:34.5

whole new way, and in the process rethink your very self.

0:40.9

The modern world we live in is one of the constant distractions.

0:45.1

It is precisely for this reason that I have designed a method for contemporary audience

0:50.0

to experience classical music.

0:54.8

It's note to self, the tech show about being human.

1:01.8

I'm a new summer ody.

1:07.6

Marina Abramovich's basic goal is to get her audience and herself more present in both

1:14.4

time and space.

1:16.6

And some of the ways that she does this are unusual, to say the least.

1:21.8

Five years ago, she broke attendance records when over 850,000 people came to see her

1:28.4

retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York.

1:32.3

And many of them specifically came to see a piece that she called the artist is present.

1:37.8

She sat in a chair for eight hours a day and invited anyone to come and sit across

1:42.3

from her and stare into her eyes for as long as they wanted to.

1:47.4

These are people took her up on this invitation, including Lou Reed, Bjork, Isabella Rosalini.

1:54.0

Some of them were so deeply moved that they wept.

1:58.7

Another one of her most famous pieces is from back in the 70s when she invited the audience

...

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