Marina Abramović Takes Over TV review – 'A sorely testing five hours'

They sorted lentils from rice and then went off to embrace a tree while everyone told us how important performance art is. As TV viewing, this was embarrassing, boring and oddly low-brow

There is a Pied Piper quality to the world’s most famous performance artist Marina Abramović. She holds audiences spellbound and seems to deliver some purgative transformational electricity. I can’t feel it myself and was constantly itching to switch over throughout her heroically egotistical “takeover” of Sky Arts. I refocused, though, when a participant offered a couple of surprising comparisons.

“Mussolini was a performance artist,” said artist Franko B in a documentary segment of the long, long evening, adding: “Hitler was a performance artist”. There was no comeback to this apparent acclaim for the Great Dictators. All we got by way of contextualisation was a clip of Hitler speaking.

When she actually did her staring – straight out of the screen, for up to half an hour at a time – it was unnerving.

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