Aboriginals are visited and condescended to. (“They should be treated as living treasures.”) Ms. Abramovic amended her section about Aboriginals after she was criticized for writing, in advance copies of “Walk Through Walls”:

“They look like dinosaurs … When you first meet them, you have to put effort into it. For one thing, to Western eyes they look terrible. Their faces are like no other faces on earth; they have big torsos (just one bad result of their encounter with Western civilization is a high-sugar diet that bloats their bodies) and sticklike legs.”

A Twitter hashtag, #theracistispresent, emerged — a twist on the title of Ms. Abramovic’s MoMA retrospective, “The Artist Is Present.” She later replied that her writing in the advance copies did not “represent the understanding and appreciation of Aboriginals that I subsequently acquired through immersion in their world.”

Ms. Abramovic reports in “Walk Through Walls” that under the right circumstances, she can foresee world events. “I dreamed of an earthquake in Italy: 48 hours later, there was an earthquake in southern Italy. I had a vision of someone shooting the Pope: 48 hours later, someone tried to shoot Pope John Paul II.”

There’s a self-help aspect to this memoir — “I hope that this book is inspirational and teaches everyone that there is no obstacle that you cannot overcome” — that blends poorly with the implicit injunctions to warm one’s hands on the blaze of her greatness. She likes to say things like, “I’m only interested in an art which can change the ideology of a society.” Her art, judged on that scale, shrinks further in size.

Ms. Abramovic was born in 1946 to well-off parents. They were war heroes, having fought the Nazis with Communists led by Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav revolutionary. While others scraped by in a difficult era, her parents had plum jobs and the family had a large apartment, a grand piano, maids, paintings, all the records and theater tickets and other privileges imaginable.

There’s something unseemly about how consistently she complains about the awfulness of her childhood — her mother was cold, she claims, and mistreated her physically and emotionally. In a remarkable paragraph, she writes (the italics are mine):

“When I was young, I thought our flat was the height of luxury. Later I discovered it had once belonged to a wealthy Jewish family, and had been confiscated during the Nazi occupation. Later I also realized the paintings my mother put in our apartment were not very good. Looking back, I think — for these and other reasons — our home was really a horrible place.”

Too bad about the Jewish family, but my mother’s taste in art was a real hitch in my stride.

There are other passages in “Walk Through Walls” that will make readers rub their eyes in disbelief. At one point she writes about having to escape, in her childhood, the “tyranny of support.”

In one of her better-known video pieces, “The Onion” (1996), Ms. Abramovic ate a raw onion while complaining about her life in a voice-over. (“I’m tired of changing planes so often … museum and gallery openings, endless receptions.”) In this shallow and misconceived memoir, she takes that onion from her mouth and places it in ours.