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Marina Abramovic raised $2M for canceled art project, hasn’t given money back

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.

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