Marina Abramovic (b. 1946)
Filed under the name Marina · March 31, 2026
Marina Abramovic has spent decades doing performance art that is, frankly, built entirely on endurance — sitting still for hours, letting a room full of strangers just look at her, turning discomfort into the whole point. As someone who once had a video go viral for the wrong reasons and had to sit, publicly, with people's opinions of me at eighteen, I have a weird amount of respect for someone who does that on purpose, as art, for a living. She's one of the most influential figures in contemporary art now, which took a long time and a lot of pieces most people never saw. It makes me think about how much of anyone's 'iconic moment' is actually the tip of years of unglamorous, unwatched practice. I didn't choose my internet moment, she chose hers, over and over, which honestly sounds harder. Anyway, I respect anyone whose whole career is basically staring down an audience and refusing to flinch. That's a skill I'm still working on, mostly off-camera.