By LARRY ROHTER and ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: November 6, 2005   more »

Marina Abramovic, in "Nude With Skeleton."

In many ways Ms. Abramovic's redux would have been the perfect illustration of the strange obsession, nurtured for more than a decade, that is bringing her to the Guggenheim: "covering" famous performance art pieces, much in the way one rock band covers another's hit, adoringly but in a different voice, with new riffs and rhythms.

In music, it's a time-honored tradition. It even happens occasionally in the visual arts with artists like Richard Pettibone, who has made a career of painting teeny copies of Warhols, Duchamps and Stellas. But in the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960's and 70's, the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.

And so when Ms. Abramovic - herself a groundbreaking performance artist - started going around seeking permission from artists or their estates, even offering to pay for the privilege of re-enacting the works, she was not always well received. She recounted going to Düsseldorf with her sights on one of Joseph Beuys's seminal pieces from 1965 - "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" - but his widow, Eva, "opened the door and said: 'Frau Abramovic, I got letter from Guggenheim. My answer is no ... but you can have coffee.' " " 'Mrs. Beuys, but I don't drink coffee - can I have a tea?' " Ms. Abramovic replied, as she recalled in a recent interview, grinning slyly at her attempt to draw out the conversation. (It worked; the piece will be one of the seven at the Guggenheim.)

Mr. Burden - who long ago retired from performance but in his prime was almost drowned and once shot in the arm for the sake of art - was not so agreeable. "I don't even know the reasons why - he didn't answer," said Ms. Abramovic, who planned to replace the Volkswagen with a Chaika, a kind of Russian-made limousine she remembered from her youth in Yugoslavia.

"He only had a secretary answer in a letter saying, 'Mr. Burden is not talking publicly these days, and he doesn't give permission to repeat this piece or any other pieces.' I can't tell you how disappointed I was."

She could not claim to be surprised, though. In her early days of performing in Belgrade in the 1970's, Ms. Abramovic (pronounced ah-BRAH-moe-vitch) would have agreed with him. "It was supposed to be that event, in that moment, and that was it," she said. But, along with some other artists, she began to chafe at these strictures, feeling that a video of a performance or written instructions for how a performance should be undertaken could be works of art themselves. "Plus, I am Russian," she said. "We love archives."

By the 1980's, many of the pioneering performance artists of her generation began to burn out or change gears. Mr. Burden moved on to installation pieces and sculpture. Vito Acconci - one of whose more infamous pieces Ms. Abramovic will recreate at the Guggenheim - also stopped performing. But Ms. Abramovic, while also moving into making objects and films, continued to perform grueling pieces with her longtime partner in life and art, the German artist Ulay. After their split in 1988, she returned to performing alone.

As she grew older - she will be 60 next year - she says she felt the strong need to preserve the memory of performances that influenced her as an artist. "There's nobody to keep the history straight," she said. "I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it." And this sense only grew stronger when she began to see ideas behind many important performances borrowed with no credit given, or appropriated by advertising and fashion.

In Google, Wal-Mart sees both a technology pioneer and the seed of a threat, said Mr. Breyer, who is also a partner in a venture capital firm. The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.

Wal-Mart is scarcely alone in its concern. As Google increasingly becomes the starting point for finding information and buying products and services, companies that even a year ago did not see themselves as competing with Google are beginning to view the company with some angst - mixed with admiration.

Google's recent moves have stirred concern in industries from book publishing to telecommunications. Businesses already feeling the Google effect include advertising, software and the news media. Apart from retailing, Google's disruptive presence may soon be felt in real estate and auto sales.

Google, the reigning giant of Web search, could extend its economic reach in the next few years as more people get high-speed Internet service and cellphones become full-fledged search tools, according to analysts. And ever-smarter software, they say, will cull and organize larger and larger digital storehouses of news, images, real estate listings and traffic reports, delivering results that are more like the advice of a trusted human expert.

Such advances, predicts Esther Dyson, a technology consultant, will bring "a huge reduction in inefficiency everywhere." That, in turn, would be an unsettling force for all sorts of industries and workers. But it would also reward consumers with lower prices and open up opportunities for new companies.

Google, then, may turn out to have a more far-reaching impact than earlier Web winners like Amazon and eBay. "Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Google, to be sure, is but one company at the forefront of the continuing spread of Internet technology. It has many competitors, and it could stumble. In the search market alone, Google faces formidable rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo.

Microsoft, in particular, is pushing hard to catch Google in Internet search. "This is hyper-competition, make no mistake," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief executive. "The magic moment will come when our search is demonstrably better than Google's," he said, suggesting that this could happen in a year or so.

Still, apart from its front-runner status, Google is also remarkable for its pace of innovation and for how broadly it seems to interpret its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The company's current lineup of offerings includes: software for searching personal computer files; an e-mail service; maps; satellite images; instant messaging; blogging tools; a service for posting and sharing digital photos; and specialized searches for news, video, shopping and local information. Google's most controversial venture, Google Print, is a project to copy and catalog millions of books; it faces lawsuits by some publishers and authors who say it violates copyright law.

Google, which tends to keep its plans secret, certainly has the wealth to fund ambitious ventures. Its revenues are growing by nearly 100 percent a year, and its profits are rising even faster. Its executives speak of the company's outlook only in broad strokes, but they suggest all but unlimited horizons. "We believe that search networks as industries remain in their nascent stages of growth with great forward potential," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, told analysts last month.

Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.

The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google's revenue.

In telecommunications, the company has made a number of moves that have grabbed the attention of industry executives. It has been buying fiber-optic cable capacity in the United States and has invested in a company delivering high-speed Internet access over power lines. And it is participating in an experiment to provide free wireless Internet access in San Francisco.