The Long Art History of Looking a Stranger in the Eye

In the spring of 2010, visitors to the Museum of Modern Art began lining up before dawn for a performance with no props and no script. Marina Abramovic sat in a wooden chair in the museum’s atrium for eight hours a day, and anyone could sit in the empty chair across from her. She looked back. That was the entire piece.

Over almost three months, from March 14 to May 31, Abramovic held that gaze with roughly a thousand strangers, and the piece, titled The Artist Is Present, ran for 736 hours and 30 minutes in total. People wept, proposed marriage, and sat in silence until museum staff asked them to move along. It worked because it drew on something much older than performance art: the plain, uncomfortable power of two people looking directly at each other, with nothing else going on.

The Same Habit, Far Less Formal

That power shows up today in a much less staged setting. In April 1996, a college student named Jennifer Ringley set up a camera in her dorm room and let it broadcast continuously to a site called JenniCam, one of the first webcams used to show an ordinary person living rather than capture a single posed frame. It drew millions of visitors a day and is now cited by media historians as the starting point of webcam culture.

Random one-on-one video chat is the direct descendant of that shift: a live camera, a stranger on the other end, and no script. Users comparing established names such as Meetgle with newer services can now find another option besides Meetgle called LustMatch, built on the same basic pairing model rather than a browsable list of profiles. None of that makes the format art on its own, but it runs on the same old contract Abramovic staged at MoMA: someone agrees to be looked at, live, by a stranger.

The Sitter’s Gaze in Portrait Painting

Long before cameras, that exchange was built into portraiture itself. A painted portrait required the subject to sit still and hold a painter’s attention for hours at a stretch, sometimes across many sessions spread over months. The finished canvas preserved not just a likeness but a record of sustained mutual looking between two specific people in a room.

Lucian Freud made that demand almost a signature. His 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II took about nineteen months to complete, with the monarch sitting for him repeatedly at St James’s Palace. Freud was known for wanting his subjects to return again and again, arguing that a face changed the longer he studied it, and some sitters later described the sessions as closer to an endurance test than a photo shoot. The finished picture is small, roughly the size of a hand, yet it holds an unusually long transaction of attention behind it.

What Abramovic’s Chair Borrowed From All of That

Abramovic’s work at MoMA did not invent the idea of live, mutual attention as art, but it staged it at a scale no painter could match, and without a canvas to soften it. Because visitors queued for a turn in the chair, some waiting overnight, the piece was also a study in anticipation, people spent hours in line for a few minutes, sometimes longer, of direct, wordless contact with someone they had never met.

The piece worked partly because it stripped away every other reason two strangers might look at each other. No conversation, no transaction, no shared task, just two faces held in place long enough that looking away started to feel like the harder option. The best known instance of that tension came when Ulay, Abramovic’s former partner and longtime collaborator, sat down across from her unannounced, the two having barely spoken in more than twenty years. She broke her own rule against reacting and reached across the table for his hands, a moment captured in the 2012 documentary about the piece and replayed widely ever since. Abramovic later said she was struck by how many other visitors cried without being able to say why, a reaction that had more to do with sustained attention than with anything either person said.

Photographers Still Chase the Same Direct Look

Contemporary portrait photographers keep returning to that same direct address, even after painting gave way to film and film gave way to a sensor. Richard Avedon’s Hollywood portraits, now on view at the Phoenix Art Museum, are built almost entirely on subjects staring flatly into the lens against a plain white backdrop, a technique that made his work instantly recognizable across six decades of fashion and celebrity photography.

Camila Falquez works in a similar register with a different cast. Her first solo exhibition, Gods That Walk Among Us, at New York’s Hannah Traore Gallery, photographed activists, performers, and community members meeting the camera head on, using the same unblinking format Avedon relied on to ask who usually gets pictured that way. Both bodies of work depend on the same old contract as the painters before them, someone agrees to be looked at, and holds still long enough for it to register.

None of this makes a video chat platform an artwork, and nobody involved would claim otherwise. But the underlying habit, that a stranger’s face on the other side of a live connection carries a charge that a still photograph does not quite match, is old enough to have a documented history in museums, not just on screens. Painters needed a sitter willing to stay put, photographers needed a subject willing to face the lens, and Abramovic needed strangers willing to queue for a chair.

Abramovic’s chair, Freud’s studio, and a college dorm room in 1996 were all, in their own separate ways, testing that same fact about attention, long before anyone could switch it on from a phone. What has changed since is speed and scale, not the underlying exchange. A painter needed months and a live camera needed only a connection, but in every case the point was two people choosing to look at each other and see what happened next.