The artist is present but the cash is gone.
Performance artist Marina Abramovic has backed out of her grandiose plans for her upstate arts institute and questions loom over what happened to the $2.2 million she raised over four years for the project, including donations from the likes of Jay-Z and nearly 5,000 donors in a Kickstarter campaign.
The edgy artist, who became world famous for staring down people in her blockbuster 2010 MOMA show, The Artist is Present, touted her multi-million dollar Marina Abramovic Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art as a place for artists to conduct grand experiments.
The Yugoslav-born Abramovic also said it would “change the local economy” in Hudson, NY, in much the same way the Sundance Film Festival transformed Park City, Utah, and the Guggenheim Museum changed the Spanish city of Bilbao.
Abramovic, 70, retained renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to resurrect a dilapidated theater into a sleek 33,000-square-foot space where visitors would have to surrender their cell phones and commit to a six-hour experience.
But last month the artiste revealed she was abandoning the project, after learning the price tag had mushroomed to $31 million.
Her surprise announcement left residents of Hudson and shocked donors questioning what she did with the cash. In addition to the 2013 Kickstarter campaign, which raised over $660,000, her non-profit institute raked in $1.5 million in donations between 2011 and 2015, tax filings show. Jay-Z gave “a substantial donation” to the Kickstarter campaign, according to press reports. He did not respond to a request for comment last week.
Some Kickstarter donors complained that they did not receive their promised rewards for contributing to the institute and others wondered how their contributions were spent, if at all, and wanted an accounting.
When asked if Abramovic would return the cash, a spokeswoman for the artist said all the money raised through Kickstarter, plus additional funds, went to pay Koolhaas’s firm.
“The funds were raised not for the renovation itself but specifically for the schematics and the feasibility study,” the spokeswoman said. “They were used for exactly that purpose.”
Multiple calls and an e-mail to Rem Koolhaas’s offices in Amsterdam and New York were not returned.
Donors to the campaign were promised CD sets on the “Abramovic Method” in which the artist demonstrates how to drink a glass of water, signed by the artist.
“I was supposed to receive a signed copy of the Abramovic Methods Exclusives DVD for a $200 pledge back in 2013 and am still waiting for it,” one Kickstarter donor wrote in August.
In Hudson, a quaint city of 6,700 about 35 miles south of Albany, Marina Abramovic was selling French macarons “that tasted like her,” in an effort to raise cash for the institute, according to a local blogger.
“There was a lot of excitement when she first announced it, but the pricetag just kept climbing and we wondered where she was going to come up with the money,” said a local official familiar with the project.
The group’s 2015 tax filings, the latest available, show it had assets of $2 million.
After her announcement at a London gallery last month that she would scrap plans for the institute, Abramovic told a group at the gallery that she would sell the property, The Art Newspaper reported.
“I, as a performance artist, could never raise $31 million unless some amazing guy from the Emirates [came forward] or some Russian who just wrote a check because he believed in me. In real life, that doesn’t happen,” Abramovic told the newspaper.
In 2007, Abramovic, who has a posh country home in nearby Chatham, bought the sprawling building in downtown Hudson for $950,000 under a limited liability company, Abramovic LLC. She donated it to her non-profit in 2013. She has said that she sold property she once owned in Amsterdam to fund the project.
Abramovic LLC racked up $88,966 in unpaid state taxes, according to state records which show a lien was filed against it in January. A spokeswoman claims the state taxes have been paid.
Abramovic confirmed to The Post through her spokeswoman that she would indeed sell the building, and would use part of the proceeds to pay off unpaid school taxes.
Hudson records show the non-profit owes $15,379 in unpaid school taxes for the institute building, which is now a local eyesore.
The pillars of the building, which was completed in 1933 as a community theater and later used as an indoor tennis center, are in danger of crumbling and the derelict interior is overgrown with weeds and pigeon droppings, a Hudson resident told The Post.