Between 14 March and 31 May 2010, Marina Abramović performed 'The Artist Is Present' in the Marron Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A single scene: a table, two chairs. From the moment the museum opened to the moment it closed (six days a week), Abramović sat motionless in one of the chairs; visitors queued to sit in the empty chair opposite, looked at her for as long as they wished (usually a few minutes), then stood up and left.

Total duration: 736 hours and 30 minutes. More than 1,500 people sat in the chair; some one million people watched the performance from the side. Some participants — including her former partner Ulay — cried; some smiled, some said nothing. Photographs of those waiting in line for hours were exhibited in a digital gallery on a side wall; Abramović said she remembered each of them individually from her 'seat'.

The radicalism of the work is the inverse of the earlier *Rhythm 0* (1974). In that performance the artist is passive and the audience active; here both are passive, only the gaze speaks. *The Artist Is Present* also became a social-media event (Instagram did not yet exist in the year of the performance, but Twitter and Facebook spread the queues); 'one million people in line' showed a new form of mass visibility for conceptual art.

Critical debate followed: some criticised the performance as 'celebrity cult in meditation costume'. The artist's silence, the static composition, and the great museum institution were signs of a passage from earlier radical street performance to a ceremonial scene. In the years that followed, Abramović founded the Performance Art Institute to work on the 'transmission' and 'reperformance' of performance — can performance art be 'lasting' like painting?