"To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else's life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. It's a very different concept. It's about true reality." These are the combative words of the self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art", Marina Abramović. She spoke them recently, while promoting a retrospective of her work that was going to take place in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
