Jay Z v Marina Abramović: they both used each other

Marina Abramović has taken art into a dangerous new marriage with pop culture. Once just a name in art-history textbooks as one of the founders of performance art, she has in recent years used pop collaborations to beam her charisma to the masses and whip up a frenzy of adulation. Where previous artists such as Richard Hamilton or Andy Warhol were interested in pop stars, Abramović has become one.

Her latest work, to paraphrase the title of Hamilton’s Swingeing London – a portrait of a media-dazzled handcuffed Mick Jagger – is Whingeing Marina.

Abramović complains that she was ripped off by rapper Jay Z, who in 2013 restaged one of her most celebrated performances, with her consent and input, as a pop video. Abramović had people weeping and vomiting when they queued to sit in front of her silent, formidable presence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jay Z approached her with the idea of turning this into a promo in which he performs his hit Picasso Baby in a face-to-face marathon with various art-world types.

Now the artist says she got nothing from the stunt: “In the end it was only a one-way transaction. I will never do it again, that I can say. Never.”

But she doesn’t need to do it again because her dalliances with Jay Z and Lady Gaga – about whom she is far kinder – have already catapulted Abramović into a totally new kind of artistic fame, the kind which seduces young fans to wait for hours just to stand in the same room as her. It is far harder to see what Jay Z got out of it. Does being chums with artists really bring him a tangible reward? The lyrics to Picasso Baby suggest someone desperate for the art world’s approval as he namechecks artists including Jeff Koons and the painter George Condo, rapping out a cultural cringe, a plea for intellectual recognition. Abramović, meanwhile, can now afford to diss him and drop him. For she has ascended to pseudo-messianic glory.

It is a measure of how completely Abramović hogs the idea of performance art in the popular imagination that when Chris Burden, an American artist who similarly pioneered martyr-like, life-threatening performance – he got himself shot in the arm and crucified on a Volkswagen – died recently there was little fuss, at least on this side of the Atlantic. I guess he should have worked with Lady Gaga.

Abramović has crossed a line that even Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are wary of. Someone was bound to do it eventually. She has not just taken art out of the gallery but into a realm of rock concert hysteria and teen adulation. To put it kindly, you can say her fans resemble the star-struck kids in old films of the Beatles. But what is the cultural price of mass intoxication? Is it a good thing? Poor Jay Z. He thought he could exploit an artist to look cool. He had no idea who he was messing with.