Serbian artist Marina Abramovic has been called the grandmother of performance art. Her works have often involved pain and endurance. In Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, her iconic 1975 performancefor-video, she aggressively combs and brushes her long
Art
hair, teasing it up, while repeating ‘art must be beautiful,
artist must be beautiful’. Her voice and expression betray her pain. In watching the video, one senses that the camera has taken the place of a mirror. Abramovic’s
must
be
Beautiful,
simple act is open to interpretation. It has been seen as exemplifying a feminist critique of expectations on
Artist
women to be beautiful, and yet it is compelling viewing
precisely because the artist is so beautiful. The work can be read as masochistic, but also as ascetic—with the
must
artist entering a trance-like state, ‘freeing body and soul
be
from the restrictions imposed by culture and from the fear of physical pain and death’. As Abramovic has
Beautiful
became one of the most famous figures in contemporary
art, it is now also easy to read the work retrospectively, as a meditation on celebrity and self-image
‘At that time, I thought that art should be disturbing rather than beautiful. But at my age now, I have started thinking that beauty is not so bad.’