{"id":63113,"date":"2025-12-07T05:11:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T05:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/63113\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T05:11:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T05:11:17","slug":"exclusive-raunchy-art-show-with-12-foot-penises-by-marina-abramovic-coming-to-contested-park-avenue-armory-as-bigwigs-fight-to-evict-child-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/63113\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive | Raunchy art show with 12-foot penises by Marina Abramovi\u0107 coming to contested Park Avenue Armory as bigwigs fight to evict child group"},"content":{"rendered":"

Park Avenue Armory honchos have been trying to\u00a0boot kid cadets from their building<\/a>\u00a0for years \u2014 but are happy to showcase\u00a0a controversial performance artist\u2019s<\/a> show depicting 12-foot penises, \u201copen orifices<\/a>\u201d and women \u201cfuriously\u201d massaging their breasts.<\/p>\n

The US debut of Marina Abramovi\u0107\u2019s four-hour \u201cBalkan Erotic Epic\u201d opens next year in the drill hall of the\u00a0Upper East Side historic building<\/a> run by a non-profit accused of using it as its own shady private country club<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Adding insult to injury, Abramovi\u0107 sits on the Armory\u2019s board of directors, creating a massive conflict of interest, critics charge.<\/p>\n

The performance, which ran in the UK this fall, features a number of 12-foot penises. Marco Anelli \u00a9 2025<\/p>\n

The show, which premiered in the UK last month, features the graphic portrayal of what Abramovic claims to be a Balkan nude fertility ritual where a groom drills three holes into a wooden bridge and puts his penis in it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing I clapped eyes on was a hairy bottom going up and down on a giant screen,\u201d wrote Adrian Chiles in his critique for\u00a0The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cThere was an awful lot to take in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show also features five guys \u201cface down, humping the ground . . . relentlessly on for the duration of the four-hour performance\u201d to fertilize the soil, as five giant penises tower above them in a grassy field.<\/p>\n

During another explicit scene, a group of seven women are seen \u201crepeatedly exposing their vulvas to the ground and sky\u201d \u2014 apparently to make the rain stop \u2014 while another naked bunch stand in a graveyard massaging their breasts \u201cwhile having a slow-motion orgy with skeletons<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another inserts a small fish in her vagina in an attempt to make her man fall further in love with her.<\/p>\n

Abramovi\u0107 makes a brief appearance in the performance. Marco Anelli \u00a9 2025<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a vainglorious, vacuous piece of schlock, riddled with soft-porn cliches,\u201d slammed\u00a0The Telegraph\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0chief art critic Alastair Sooke.<\/p>\n

The mixed reviews haven\u2019t dampened the Armory\u2019s enthusiasm.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBalkan Erotic Epic makes you rethink taboos about how the body should work,\u201d said Armory CEO Rebecca Robertson to\u00a0ARTnews<\/a>. \u201cI promise you, you will see what I mean when you see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one point in the show, a group of women \u201cfuriously\u201d massage their breasts. Courtesy of the Marina Abramovi\u0107 Archives<\/p>\n

The $85 tickets have already gone on sale for the December 2026 show. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis doesn\u2019t seem aligned whatsoever to what they committed to in terms of services that they\u2019re supposed to provide to the community,\u201d said Upper East Sider Jay Stallard. \u201cI guess erotic art has its place, but what are they going to do . . . bring poor kids from schools and let them enjoy this sort of performance? I find the organization to be personally repulsive. It seems like it\u2019s their own personal social club.\u201d<\/p>\n

The state-owned military building on Park Avenue and East 66th Street is at the center of a court fight between the Park Avenue Conservancy and a group of\u00a0child cadets that have<\/a> used a small room in the full-square-block landmark for more than 100 years.<\/p>\n

Abramovi\u0107 first made a splash in 1974 when she let strangers do whatever they wanted to her for six hours. Dave Benett\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The conservancy continues to try to evict the kids despite a bill\u00a0signed last year by Gov. Hochul<\/a> protecting the 150-year-old Knickerbocker Greys youth cadet program.<\/p>\n

The Armory wouldn\u2019t say if and how much Abramovi\u0107 \u2014 a board member since 2012 \u2014 is getting paid for her erotic show. But critics are calling it a blatant conflict of interest.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe grants that have been afforded to these people in the name of art, it\u2019s astronomical. And it\u2019s not like a ticket to the naked lady show is going to bring in a gazillion dollars,\u201d said Stallard. \u201cIt just reeks of corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nonprofit bigwigs have been fighting to evict a group of child cadets from this historical Park Ave. military building. J.C. Rice<\/p>\n

The Armory has received $19.8 million in public funds since 2020 from the NYS Council on the Arts & NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, yet spent $30.4 million on productions in 2023, which only brought in $11.4 million, according to its latest available tax filings.<\/p>\n

Serbian-born Abramovi\u0107, 78, first made a splash in 1974 when she let strangers do whatever they wanted to her for six hours as part of a performance piece at a Naples art gallery.<\/p>\n

The scene quickly descended into complete savagery, with people cutting up her clothes, sexually abusing her, even cutting her neck and drinking her blood \u2014 all while the artist known as the \u201cgrandmother of performance art\u201d stood motionless.<\/p>\n

The show is premiering at the Park Avenue Armory in December 2026. Marco Anelli \u00a9 2025<\/p>\n

One person even pointed a loaded gun at her head.<\/p>\n

And she is no stranger to scandals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2017, The Post ran an expose called \u201cthe art of the steal,\u201d after the edgy artist backed out of her plans to turn an upstate building into an art center, amid\u00a0questions of where the $2.2 million in donations<\/a>\u00a0she\u2019d collected went. Abramovi\u0107 never faced legal action for the missing money.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Post ran a front-page expose on Abramovi\u0107 in 2017. New York Post<\/p>\n

Conspiracy theorists had a field day with her in 2016, after WikiLeaks published a batch of emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign chairman, that included a note from Abramovi\u0107 to Podesta\u2019s brother, inviting him to a\u00a0\u201cSpirit Cooking dinner\u201d \u2013\u00a0a reference to her\u00a01996 performance \u201cSpirit Cooking\u201d in which she used pig\u2019s blood to write \u201caphrodisiac recipes\u201d on the wall.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m an artist, I\u2019m not a satanist,\u201d\u00a0Abramovi\u0107 insisted at the time<\/a>. \u201cThey Googled me, and I am perfection to fit a conspiracy theory.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Park Avenue Armory honchos have been trying to\u00a0boot kid cadets from their building\u00a0for years \u2014 but are happy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1149,33346,57,9,11,10,467,33347,33348,58],"class_list":{"0":"post-63113","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-marina-abramovic","10":"tag-metro","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-news","14":"tag-park-avenue","15":"tag-penises","16":"tag-serbia","17":"tag-us-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}