Edgy performance artist Marina Abramović has become a “wellness” entrepreneur, selling $125 “immunity drops” made with raw garlic and chili peppers and a $250 “cleanser” which includes white bread — after her “Abramović Institute” plan collapsed.
Abramović became world famous for staring down people in a blockbuster Museum of Modern Art show in New York in 2010, building on a career which included provocative nudity, with visitors to part of the show having to squeeze between a naked man and a naked woman.
She was also the focus of bizarre QAnon conspiracy theories that she was involved in a cannibalistic Satanic pedophile cabal.
But her grand plans for an arts center bearing her name in the Hudson Valley have fizzled and her foundation took in just $7 in 2022, The Post has learned.
Instead she has launched a range of “longevity” products, which are not FDA-approved, with the aid of an alternative health guru who advocates leeches as a therapy and a recipe credited to a Tibetan monk.
They “provide a pathway to optimal health and longevity,” Abramović claims on her e-commerce site.
Her latest venture, the Abramović Longevity Method, is a pricey skin care and wellness line featuring face lotion, “anti-allergy,” “energy” and “immunity drops” retailing for as much as $580.
On a newly-launched, British-priced e-commerce site, Abramović said she “developed the Abramović Method to help me and others recenter themselves and focus on what is most important — to live in the present, long and healthily.”
Abramović told British Vogue this week she was not selling out, and wanted to share the secrets of her looks, saying: “I don’t lie, I don’t compromise, what you see is what you get and what you get is pure truth. This is ‘credibility.’”
Abramović has gone into business with Nonna Brenner, who runs the Center of Health and Prophylaxis, an alternative medicine retreat on a lake near Salzburg, Austria.
Brenner says she uses Tibetan medicine, herbs and other holistic approaches — including leeches — to help high-end clients who have included Donna Karan recharge and adopt healthier lifestyles.
In a video posted to the center’s website, Abramović claims that Brenner helped cure her lyme disease and high blood pressure using leeches and garlic drops, among other ancient healing techniques, when she first went to see her in 2017. She returns twice a year.
The health products the business partners are pushing use ingredients including white bread and white wine in a $252 cleanser/exfoliator, while the $125 “immunity drops” are made from fresh lemon, raw garlic, and flower pollen.
“Anti-allergy” drops, also $125, use licorice root. The full range of drops and lotion are available in a $580 box.
Brenner describes herself as a Kazakh-born, German-trained doctor. She told the Financial Times that she got the recipes for the drops and lotions from a Tibetan monk named Dr. Lu Shen.
The performance artist, 77, had tried to create a museum in the Hudson Valley, announcing the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, in 2007.
It was supposed to be a world center of bold art experiment, based in a 17,000 square foot property in Hudson, New York, which would “change the local economy” in the town like the Sundance Film Festival transformed Park City, Utah and the Guggenheim changed Bilbao, Spain.
In 2007, she paid $950,000 for the property on Hudson’s Columbia St., close to Malden Bridge, where she owns a five-bedroom star-shaped country home, and hired Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus to design a museum, study center and event space.
In 2013, she transferred the property to her non-profit to begin raising funds in earnest, but when she turned to Kickstarter and other methods to raise the $21 million she needed, her efforts fell flat.
She raised just $2.2 million despite help from Jay-Z — and refused to give the cash back when she shelved the project. At the time a spokesman told The Post the money was raised to pay Koolhaus, now renovate the building.
Abramović quietly sold the building in September 2021 for $800,000, a loss of $150,000, to Galvan Initiatives, a social services non-profit.
And in 2022 her non-profit ended the year with zero contributions and $7 in total revenue, according to its latest publicly available tax filings.
Meanwhile Abramović LLC, the for-profit company that markets her art, got more than $130,000 in Paycheck Protection Program money from the federal government to help small businesses pay their employees during the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
A spokesman for the Abramović Foundation said they were focusing more of their efforts in Europe.
In addition to her 2010 exhibition “The Artist is Present” in which she sat immobile for more than 730 hours in the atrium of the MoMa for three months, Abramović has filmed herself cleaning a skeleton and produced a cook book that includes a recipe calling for mixing “fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk.”
She was also the focus of false Q Anon conspiracy theories that she was part of a ring of Satanic cannibal pedophiles who fed on children.
It grew out of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails including one from Abramović inviting the candidate’s campaign manager John Podesta to a “spirit cooking” dinner hosted by the artist.
She told The Guardian that it was a reference to an installation which wrote poems in pig’s blood, and added: “I’m an artist, I’m not a satanist. They Googled me, and I am perfection to fit a conspiracy theory.”
