Biographies authorized by their subjects tend to be greeted with suspicion, but to mistrust either the veracity or the completeness of Westcott's narrative would largely be to miss one of its central tenets; that is, that Marina Abramović is an artist who is still very much alive. Cooperating so fully with Westcott on this biography is a strategy that should be considered alongside, for instance, Abramović's re-performance of her own work and that of others in Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005, or the recent establishment of her institute for the preservation of performance art in Hudson, New York. Moreover, it is not simply that, as Westcott notes in his Epilogue, having reached her sixties, ‘Abramović is managing her legacy in advance’ (p. 309). The story he tells is of a woman who has always carefully constructed, documented and refined her life/career for public consumption. For example, very early in the first chapter – which establishes Abramović's childhood sense of neglect by her war-hero parents in Yugoslavia – Westcott notes that she often conflates the histories of her great-uncle and grandfather in order to position the latter as a martyred patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. It is also significant that the majority of the photographs, even of her family, in this nicely illustrated book are published courtesy of the ‘Abramović archive’ rather than the artist herself. Westcott discusses how the iconic video of Art Must Be Beautiful/Artist Must Be Beautiful (1975) was made without an audience, immediately after its original public performance (which had also been filmed) at a festival in Copenhagen. Abramović was unhappy with the lack of precision of the original footage and repeated the savage performance in full and straight away, in future using the second version ‘exclusively to represent the performance’ (p. 95). Interestingly, Westcott warns against ‘orthodox feminist’ readings of this piece which position both its title and action as primarily ironic, noting that Abramović rarely identifies with ‘Western-style feminism’ and that her art occasionally does work through her own lack of self-esteem. The boundaries between ‘performance’ and ‘life’ are hazy for Abramović and it is no surprise that this biography comprises detailed and illuminating descriptions of her works as an artist. Indeed, Westcott believes that it is only in performance, in public, that she ‘can access the authentic Marina Abramović’ (p. 307). He quotes the curator Klaus Biesenbach (p. 307) as saying, ‘I think she saw herself as an institution from the very beginning. I think she doesn't see herself that much as a person’. If there is a weakness in this meticulously researched book, it is that occasionally interpretations and opinions are not attributed and are presented as ‘fact’, thus making it unclear on whose authority and understandings they are based. Still, Westcott has almost certainly produced what will be considered Abramović's definitive biography, at least of her first sixty-five years. There is likely much more to come.