The problem of presence Presence wracks the contemporary artist’s existence. Take, for instance, Marina Abramovic’s 2010 retrospective, , during which the artist famously sat in the gallery for the entirety of her exhibition’s run at MoMA. In her essay “‘The Artist is Present’: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” critic Amelia Jones argues that the very fact that Abramovic was there, in the live act, “destroys presence (or makes the impossibility of its being secured... [more]