Much ink, real and digital, has been expended on the closing of the Marina Abramović retrospective, The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art.

“But,” writes Alisa Solomon in a thoughtful piece at Killing the Buddha, “for all the ecstatic attention—and cranky critiques, too—trained on the art world’s equivalent of an audience with the pope, an important aspect of the performance has been overlooked: the deep aesthetic, communal, even spiritual (and sometimes contentious) experiences of hundreds of people who waited all day along the perimeter of the square performance space in vain hopes of taking a turn in the chair.”

Read the full article here.