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Thanks to some high-profile promotion spurred on by Lady Gaga and Jay-Z, Marina Abramovic has surpassed her Kickstarter goal to raise money for a long-durational performance art centre.

The Marina Abramovic Institute hoped to raise $600,000 but ended up bringing in more than the goal amount: Kickstarter took in $661,454 from 4,765 contributors, with more than 1,000 people donating between $1 and $5. The funds will be used to begin work on the 29,000 sq ft former theatre based in Hudson, New York, which Ambramovic purchased for $950,000. The design of the institute will be lead by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, world-renowned architects from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Whether you're an admirer of her art or not, her unrelenting work ethic is certainly admirable. As well as using Twitter to encourage online activity, she answered absurd questions on Reddit, spearheaded an eight-hour reading of the 1961 science-fiction novel Solaris, organised a flashmob in Oslo, collaborated with Lady Gaga on a video recreating the famous Abramovic Method in the nude, and practised some light-hearted tomfoolery as she described with deliberate deadpan just how many hours it takes a performance artist to change a light bulb. She also stopped by to nuzzle faces with Jay-Z as he performed his track Picasso Baby for six hours in homage to her 2010 performance, The Artist is Present, where she sat motionless in MoMA's atrium for 736 hours.

Speaking to the New York Times, Abramovic explained her motivation behind the Marina Abramovic Institute: "When I did The Artist is Present the people who sat in front of me were different races, cultures, from different social backgrounds. It was a very intense experience; it's not a painting or a sculpture, but an emotional event, and all these people felt it," she said. "They understood the incredible power of long-durational work. After that I had an incredible urge to leave behind something, all my knowledge of 40 years doing this work. But it's a larger idea than just my work. How can we make a platform to change human consciousness?"