Performance artist Marina Abramovic said in a new interview that Jay Z hasn’t followed through with his promise to help her institute after the two collaborated on a music video.
Jay Z adapted her famous The Artist Is Present performance, in which she sat still for hours at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for his “Picasso Baby” video. In that, he rapped the song for six hours before people at MOMA and it was edited into a music video for HBO in 2013. Abramovic even agreed to appear in the video, notes E! News.
Nearly two years later, Abramovic told Spike Art Magazine that Jay never followed through with the deal they reached to let him adapt The Artist Is Present. Apparently, he was supposed to donate to the Marina Abramovic Institute, which he never did.
“The day before, he came to my office and I gave him an entire power point presentation and said: okay, you can help me, because I really need help to build this thing,” Abramovic said. “Then he just completely used me. And that wasn’t fair. This is very different from Lady Gaga, for example, who has done great work for me. Just by having 45 million followers, she brought all these young kids into my public.”
Abramovic later called it a “one-way transaction” and she will “never do it again.”
The collaboration with Lady Gaga that Abramovic referred to also happened in 2013. Gaga appeared nude in a Kickstarter video to help raise funds for Abramovic’s institute. Obviously, that went much better than her work with Jay Z.
image courtesy of Walter McBride/INFphoto.com