Marina Abramovic’s show is only of interest to diehard fans

‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls posed this question on their feminist poster, the answer suggested by the Royal Academy’s Marina Abramovic retrospective – touted as the first solo show by a woman artist in the main galleries – is: ‘They don’t have to, but it helps.’

Abramovic achieved fame in the 1970s with a series of gruelling performances that tested the limits of her mental and physical endurance. But without the nudity, performances such as ‘Freeing the Body’ (1975), in which she danced till she dropped, and ‘Lips of Thomas’ (1975), in which she consumed a kilo of honey and a litre of wine before flogging herself, incising a communist star on her stomach and lying on a cross made of ice, would not have attracted the same degree of attention. 

It’s no accident that a performance involving nudity is the talking point of this show.