the artist is too present
What do Tilda Swinton and AverageKidLuke have in common?
There has been a major shift in the architecture of attention. Performance was once a discreet event, now it is an expectation of day to day life. Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present is a spectacular example of this change. In 2010 Abramovic sat in the same chair at the MoMa every day for three months. With a single chair opposite her she invited museum visitors to sit with her, motionless, whilst the rest of the museum goers watch. Similarly, Tilda Swinton’s The Maybe also at the MoMa in 2013, where she layed asleep in a glass box, sparked my interest. Both pieces took a passive act of being watched and turned into into something deliberate, visible yet contained.
In The Artist is Present Abramovic performed endurance and availabilty. The piece explored intimacy, celebrity and survaillence all at once. The MoMa became her controlled arena where people could choose to just look, be seen or to “experience” the artist. Looking back at it, this performance and the way the audience behaved foreshadows what we now live in, waiting in line, crying, documenting the moment, it all paralells the state of social media we now live in, that in 2009, was just starting to take shape.
The Maybe also explores celebrity. Swinton became the literal art object, the public did not come to watch her perform but came to see her exist. We now live in a time where this is not a radical idea, to be a celebrity of the digital age, its enough to just be present, that can be the product.
In the 2010s these artists that voluntarily gave us themselves as object of attention set the standard for performance in the 2020s, public gaze is now unavoidable. As our screens have replaced the glass box, we must also understand that the devices we use to watch art also produce, dictate and distribute it.
3 cultural shift explain how we got here:
Goodbye gatekeeper
Paparazzi, tabloids, TMZs etc. used to be the bridge between the celebrity and the public. Now we do it all ourselves. Filming, posting tagging, narrating, it is in our hands. Deuxmoi is literally a crowd sourced, decentralized tabloid. So, celebrity is no longer defined by institutions like a museum or a record label but by the spectators who watch and circulate their image.
Virality is competence
Where artists previously needed training or institutional support, today all you need is content. Presence itself has become the currency. Personal brand outweighs skill. As fans seek authenticity and something that doesn’t feel manufactured by a marketing machine, authenticity has morphed into its own type of performance.
The process has become the stage
What Abramovic and Swinton did intentionally as art is now being reproduced as marketing. Earlier this year Finnish rapper AverageKidLuke, stayed in the corner glass window of a department store, creating an album that was to be released the following week. As people commuted to work they could stop and watch the him with this producers, laying down lyrics and adlibs. In the afternoon tweens would rush from school to go and stand by the window and wave to their favorite artists hoping to get acknowledge. Influencers and other rappers would come and go, making their creative process that usually happens behind the closed walls of a dark studio into a spectacle. What he did in the department store window was perform a pseudo-moment: art-making as spectacle, spectatorship as participation, and celebrity as a shared illusion of access.
So can we recreate the feeling of a true artist being present? probably not. Abramović’s and Swinton’s performances worked because they contrasted the culture around them. They made the act of staring strange and ritualistic. They took our desire to watch celebrities and concentrated it into a single point.
In 2025 we are always watching, celebrities are always watched and everyone is both the audience and the performer. There is no novelty tied to presence anymore. To recreate the emotional intensity of The Artist Is Present today, a performance would need to do the opposite of what made that piece powerful. Instead of hyper-availability, the next frontier might be withholding, some type of anti-performance that resist the demand to be seen.
I wonder whether I even need the artist to be present. Digital presence created access but it is also distant because there is always something parasocial. When AverageKidLuke was behind the glass, the glass mattered. It symbolised the digital barrier. It simply reproduced social media, it was constant but with distant access just recreated physically. Celebrity has mutated into a kind of performance art without an off-switch. Artists must manufacture presence to remain visible and fans participate in surveillance as a form of devotion. The line between art, marketing, and sense of self has completely blurred. This is why celebrity feels both more intimate and more soulless nowadays: we have access to everything except the reality of the person.
If the 2010s taught us how to look, the 2020s have taught us that the looking never stops. The glass box has been shattered into the glow of a screen and the artist we once approached with reverence has become overly available and endlessly scrollable. What once required a museum, a frame or a deliberate gesture now happens on screens everywhere all at once. In this flood of presence the one thing that actually slips away is the person. The question is no longer whether the artist is present, but whether they can ever stop the performance.