The veteran performance artist’s Balkan Erotic Epic, staged at Aviva Studios, Manchester, was described as her ‘magnum opus’: no minor thing given the popular spectacles Abramović has staged in the past (documented in her retrospectives this year at Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, Kunsthaus Zürich and the Albertina Modern, Vienna). No false advertising to the title either, a work of promenade theatre in 13 stages that wasn’t for the prudish, featuring graphic rituals concerning sex and the body performed from East European folkloric tradition (embroidered with her usual ingredients of discomfort, latent violence and highwire emotion). For every Abramović cynic (whose existence she acknowledges, telling The Independent, ‘They say what I’m doing is ridiculous’), she has legions of fans. Among her acolytes are those enrolled at the Marina Abramović Institute, which staged a monthlong residency at Germany’s Museum Schloss Moyland, and the Emperor of Japan, who awarded her the Praemium Imperiale. Through all that she had time to issue a new drop of NFTs – a collection titled Marina Abramović Element.