The institute takes the blame for the beef between Marina Abramovic and the Jiggaman, claiming that they forgot to tell the performance artist about the rapper's donation after his video shoot.
- May 22, 2015
AceShowbiz - Marina Abramovic Institute broke silence in the feud between the performance artist and Jay-Z over the rapper's 2013 "Picasso Baby" music video. The beef started after Abramovic called the video shoot "a one-way transaction," which was responded by Jay-Z's camp revealing a receipt from the Institute that acknowledged a donation from the rapper.
The Institute quickly issued an apology, "Marina Abramovic was not informed of Shawn 'JAY Z' Carter's donation from two years ago when she recently did an interview with Spike Magazine in Brazil. We are sincerely sorry to both Marina Abramovic and Shawn 'JAY Z' Carter for this, and since then we have taken to appropriate actions to reconcile this matter."
Jay-Z was filming "Picasso Baby" music video at the Pace Gallery in New York while Marina Abramovic was performing her work "The Artist Is Present". Two years later in a recent interview with Spike, she lashed out at the rapper over their collaboration, "I am very pissed by this, since he adapted my work only under one condition: that he would help my institute. Which he didn't."
She added, "The day before, he came to my office and I gave him an entire power point presentation and said: okay, you can help me, because I really need help to build this thing. Then he just completely used me. And that wasn't fair. This is very different from Lady GaGa, for example, who has done great work for me. Just by having 45 million followers, she brought all these young kids into my public."
Jay-Z insisted that he had kept his end of the bargain. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the rapper's art advisor and a gallerist, read aloud a receipt over the phone to Artnet news to confirm a substantial donation made by the rapper to the institute. "Thank you for your donation," read a note on the receipt.
