Why idiots think Marina Abramovic is the leader of a global Satanic cult
Recently, I had the misfortune of looking up the queen of performance art, Marina Abramovic, on a popular social media platform.
To be clear, the misfortune wasn’t looking up the renowned performance art practitioner. I’ve been a fan of hers now for over a decade, and that’s not going anywhere anytime soon. No, the unfortunate part was the popular social media platform, as looking her up forced me to reckon with a vast, deeply unsettling side of the internet that I wasn’t expecting, and would be hilarious if it wasn’t so real. You’d think we’d be used to that now, but no.
What I discovered wasn’t people celebrating the Serbian native for her shocking, transgressive and incredibly courageous brand of performance art. Neither was it the more bog-standard kind of misogynistic social media backlash that any woman who dares to be the slightest bit weird and creative gets, like Björk or Yoko Ono gets. No, this was something utterly bizarre. It was people who were genuinely scared of Marina Abramovic.
In a way, you can understand it. After all, this is a woman braver than anyone you’ve ever been close to, who has danced with death more than most and done so in the name of performance art. This is the kind of woman who once put a loaded gun on a table of things anyone could use on her, then stood still for six hours. Not so fun fact, someone actually pulled that gun on her, and she didn’t move a centimetre while another attendee of the performance pulled it away from him.
This new discovery had simultaneously nothing to do with her art and everything to do with it. Seemingly, thousands of people had taken a look at Marina Abramovic’s work and had decided that she wasn’t doing all this in the name of art, but in the name of a Satanic cult infiltrating Hollywood. One that Abramovic herself was at the very top of, pulling the strings of everyone involved. Typically, this began in the midst of the “pizza-gate” conspiracy theory, and it won’t surprise you at all to know that these wack-jobs are the ones parroting this nonsense about Abramovic.
The leak of Hilary Clinton’s emails had shown that a few of her staffers gave to a Kickstarter campaign that Abramovic ran. A few of them had specifically given enough to have a “Spirit Cooking” dinner with her, an act based on a 1996 work of hers of the same name, which saw her paint the walls of an Italian gallery with pig’s blood and draw a few vague sigils in it. These maniacs caught wind of this and decided that Abramovic was the ringleader of this whole cult.
Ever since then, a considerable part of the internet is now convinced that a Serbian performance artist is leading a Satanic takeover of Hollywood’s elites. So much so that an entire documentary has been made on the subject called Out of Shadows. One stuffed to the brim with bad faith actors and grifters stoking up fear in the name of getting a payday by saying scary shit that they don’t believe for a second. Obviously, there’s absolutely no truth to this whatsoever.
‘Spirit Cooking’ isn’t even one of her better pieces. It’s a bit of shock tactics that Abramovic probably didn’t think twice about until she thought about putting it on the Kickstarter list. That’s the problem with shock tactics. Sometimes they work far too well, and the name of someone as respected as her gets bogged down with insane people calling her a Satanist at best and a paedophile at worst. However, this is Marina Abramovic we’re talking about.
If there’s anyone who has skin thick enough to weather anything these frauds throw at her, it’s her.