Radical Art as A Commercial Product in Post-Socialist Context

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Art III: Charting Emancipatory Spaces: Insights on Art from Yugoslav Socialism and Post-Socialism II

Abstract

Marina Abramović is one of the most acclaimed and internationally recognized living performance artists today, whose oeuvre marked the history of Western and (post-)Yugoslav contemporary art in the last half a century. My paper discusses the curatorial concept of the Belgrade iteration of the artist’s European retrospective touring exhibition, The Cleaner (2019). The paper focuses on the dominant aesthetic mechanism of the artist’s strategy that commodified and commercialized her entire oeuvre by using digital media, the bodies of other artists, and the audience in reproducing the artist’s commercial projects in her homeland, post-socialist Serbia. The research derives data from my direct access to the exhibition, other sociocultural events that preceded and followed the exhibition's opening, and my opportunity to meet Abramović and her marketing team. My paper shows that the retrospective transformed the artist’s once body-centric, non-formative, and non-commercial radical art into a commercial currency that can be bought and sold to the global and local mainstream audience and the twenty-first-century globalized art market.

Author

• Julija Pesic, U of Toronto (Canada)