33 Artists in 3 Acts (34 page)

For Bankowsky, one of the exhibition’s highlights is a partial restaging of Jeff Koons’s controversial “Made in Heaven” show. In a room separated from the rest of the exhibition, with a parental guidance sign on the door, a range of sculptures and paintings depict Koons and Ilona Staller, his porn star ex-wife, performing graphic sexual acts.
Dirty
—
Jeff on Top
(1991), a life-size sculpture of the couple in flagrante delicto, is the focal point of the room. Around it are works such as
Exaltation
(1991), a large-scale photorealist closeup of a cum-splattered Staller with
Koons’s penis. “‘Made in Heaven’ is an archetypal instance of an artist pushing things too far and creating outrage,” says Bankowsky. “Our show reclaims these moments as definitive.”

Bankowsky and I greet Rob Pruitt, a New York artist, then Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist–curator–collector–gallerist, both of whom have work in the exhibition. I’ve already been around the show so I am observing artists and revisiting works about which I’m likely to write. On the other side of the room, a paparazzo is snapping a shot of Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate, talking to Grayson Perry, the “transvestite potter,” as the tabloids call him, who is working on a show about “Unknown Craftsmen.” A few yards to their right is Maurizio Cattelan, standing in front of a black and silver Warhol painting titled
Myths
(1981), which has vertical strips of fictitious characters, each repeated ten times. After Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Sam, Aunt Jemima, Dracula, and the Wicked Witch of the West, Warhol positioned a column of portraits of himself.

Cattelan has a new horse sculpture on display in an adjacent room. This taxidermy beast is lying on the ground, staked with a sign that says “INRI,” an acronym of the Latin for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Bankowsky is still not sure what to make of it. “If the dead horse is Maurizio’s alter ego,” he muses, “then this act of king-making could be outlandish one-upmanship or a way of problematizing the packaging of artists.” Bankowsky’s verbal style is an idiosyncratic combination of highfalutin and colloquial phrases; he resignedly refers to it as “Valley Girl meets art-speak.” When he is drawn into another conversation, I go over to Cattelan to ask about his Christ horse. “Maybe I’ve been martyred,” he says coyly. “Punished for too much pop life!” When I suggest that we go look at the horse together, he reacts with a clownish expression of horror. “I don’t like having my picture taken in front of my works. It looks stupid,” he says. “Photographers will catch you with the piece if you are not careful.”

We meander into a corridor full of Warhol memorabilia, including photographs of the Pop master air-kissing celebrities at openings. Standing below a black-and-white picture of Warhol and Salvador Dalí is Jeff Koons talking to Jeffrey Deitch, a dealer and longstanding Koons
supporter. We greet the two men and exchange niceties. Cattelan turns to Koons, wipes his forehead as if he were overheated, and says, “Phew. People can’t stay in your room for too long because they get horny. I should stand just outside so I can catch women as they leave the room.” Deitch laughs. Koons stares at Cattelan with a stiff smile, saying nothing.

Later, I find myself on my own in a room devoted to works from Hirst’s 2008 “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction. It is an onslaught of glitz: a calf suspended in formaldehyde in a gold-plated tank on a Carrara marble plinth titled
False Idol
; a pair of gold cabinets lined with manufactured diamonds; a large spot painting with a gold background; and a butterfly painting smothered in gold paint called
The Kiss of Midas
. These flashy pieces are continuations of previous bodies of work that have adopted the visual rhetoric of luxury goods. For many years, Hirst repeated the line, “Art is about life and the art world is about money. You’ve got to keep the two things separate.” However, with the “Beautiful” works, money has become a dominant motif, embedded in the gilded paint like his dead butterflies. Hirst likes to pursue “universal triggers,” as he calls them.

These art objects, however, are not the main reason for Hirst’s inclusion in the exhibition. As the wall text declares, the Sotheby’s auction is significant because Hirst “infiltrated the art market” and “turned one of its defining rituals into a work of total theatre.” Miuccia Prada, the fashion designer and buyer-loaner of the pickled calf installed here, told me that she thought of the auction as “an incredible conceptual gesture, not a sale.” Certainly, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sounds like an ironic-iconic artwork, but artists’ opinions are split. Some regard the auction as a daredevil coup and a moment of unprecedented artistic empowerment. Others declare that Hirst has ceased to be an artist. Art is supposed to have goals more profound than profit and the auction was openly mercenary. Hirst, they think, has mutated into a product designer.

Whatever Hirst’s identity, the “Beautiful” sale was innovative business. The art market is divided into “primary,” which is new work sold through galleries, and “secondary,” literally secondhand art, often sold at auction. Usually the only new works sold at auction are donated by artists to raise money for charity, but Hirst’s sale was full of primary material straight
out of his studio, some of it not yet dry. Sotheby’s delighted in promoting their brand around a celebrity artist rather than the usual jumble of inanimate objects. Never had so much of Hirst’s art been seen in one place; various Sotheby’s specialists even implied it was a retrospective.

Few people were convinced that the market could absorb 223 lots from one artist in twenty-four hours. Moreover, the first part of the auction took place the very evening in September 2008 that Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. The financial crisis was imminent. No one on Wall Street or in the City of London knew whose business might be next. Nevertheless, the sale made £111 (almost $200m) and had a sell-through rate of 97 percent—a feat so incredible that many art-market observers were skeptical that the results were entirely legitimate. The art world’s suspicion of the sale was exacerbated by the public relations fiasco that surrounded
For the Love of God
(2007), a platinum skull studded with 8,601 diamonds, which was marketed around an asking price of $100 million. Although Frank Dunphy, Hirst’s business manager, announced that “a group composed of a number of interested individuals” were purchasing the skull at its full price in August 2007,
The Art Newspaper
revealed that Hirst and his dealer, Jay Jopling, still owned it six months later. For a time, the confusion cast doubt on Hirst’s integrity.

However, Hirst’s “Beautiful” auction increasingly appears to have been a genuine financial success. It grew the market; buyers came from twenty-two countries and over a third of them had never bought contemporary art before. Neophyte collectors from the former Soviet Union were among the biggest spenders. Larissa Machkevitch, the wife of a Kazakh mining magnate, for example, bought the golden wall works in this room along with three other lots from the evening sale.

One cloud of doubt that lingers over the sale relates to the fate of—and, some presume, mischief behind—the top lot,
The Golden Calf
(2008), a bull in formaldehyde with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, crowned by a solid gold disc. The title refers to the biblical story about the sin of worshipping idols and adoring wealth. Many saw the garish sculpture as undesirable—the ultimate test of a bull market—but it sold for a record £10.3 million ($18.6m) to an anonymous telephone bidder. The persistent rumor was that it was acquired by the royal family of Qatar. “I don’t think that’s true,” said Hirst when I asked him about it
during my visit in Devon. “I’m sure [the Qataris] did buy things. But it’s all hearsay.”

Could another artist pull off this volume of trade, selling over two hundred pieces in one fell swoop? Although Hirst is to some extent the son of Koons, the American artist ten years his senior is a conservative market player who issues works in controlled editions of five and concentrates exclusively on the very high end. Nothing could be further away from Hirst’s risk-loving modus operandi and his desire to reach out with a broad range of price points. Moreover, Koons is generally cagey about business whereas Hirst is happy to make a spectacle of it.

Bankowsky wanders into the room and we resume our conversation. “The whole issue of Hirst’s participation was complicated,” admits the critic–curator as he inspects the white hair and dainty golden hooves of
False Idol
. “He was the only artist with whom Alison and I did not have direct contact. He was unavailable and his stance on the show was inscrutable. Although we eventually obtained exactly the works we wanted, all the negotiations were done with the higher-ups at Tate.” Bankowsky and his co-curators were surprised that they were not greeted with open arms. “Perhaps he was concerned about the way we would position him, or maybe it was about keeping his luxury label above the rest, just like Louis Vuitton doesn’t want to be on the same shelf as a less pricey brand.” Bankowsky was keen to have Hirst’s work in the show even though it went against his personal taste. “Hirst is perfect for our theme—a pure symptom.”

I ask Bankowsky to come with me to look at the work of Andrea Fraser. Fraser is an impressive risk-taker who can also be seen as a kind of anti-Hirst. While Hirst produces goods, Fraser’s performances are services. Whereas he often spins his messages, she has an almost self-destructive desire to reveal the truth. We walk through a couple of rooms until we come to the white-walled alcove that hosts
Untitled
(2003). A small, ordinary monitor sitting atop a pedestal displays a video of the artist having sex with a collector in a hotel room.
*
In a transaction
brokered by Fraser’s New York dealer, Friedrich Petzel, the collector prepaid for the production of the video rather than the encounter it represents. Whether it is a metaphor or an extreme literalization, the work is an enactment of the artist as prostitute. As Fraser told the
Brooklyn Rail
, “
Untitled
is about what it means to be an artist and sell your work—sell what may be a very intimate part of yourself, your desire, your fantasies, and to allow others to use you as a screen for their fantasies.”

The idea behind Fraser’s
Untitled
is sensationalist, but the video is intentionally unspectacular. It consists of one silent, static shot, taken from a high angle, suggestive of surveillance cameras. At this moment, Fraser has her back to the camera, her bare buttocks in full view, but it is unclear what exactly the couple is up to, in part because the scale is so small. Fraser usually plays characters, but this looks like two real people awkwardly having sex for the first time on a white-sheeted king-size bed.
Untitled
has none of the glorified impropriety of Koons’s “Made in Heaven” work, nor any of the schmaltzy romanticism of Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.” In fact,
Untitled
is such a straightforward document that the Petzel Gallery’s visitors’ book was full of complaints that the piece was not sexy at all.

“Andrea is really good for the ecology of the show,” says Bankowsky. “No one could accuse her of pandering to the market.”
Untitled
comes in an edition of five with two artist’s proofs. “Lots of creeps wanted to buy it but we refused to sell it to them,” Petzel told me. “We recently raised the price to make it even harder to buy. The first video went to the participating collector. A good Belgian collector and the Generali Foundation in Austria took the next two. The remaining videos are for museums but most public institutions are still scared to buy it.”

Video art is tricky to sell at the best of times, but Fraser makes it even more difficult by forcing buyers of the work to sign a stringent contract that declares that they are not entitled to show
Untitled
without her consent and that she has the right to review any publicity material they generate about the work. By contrast, Fraser did not have a contract with the collector with whom she had sex. That “exchange” was based on trust. He had bought her work in the past so it felt like “a good
match,” as Petzel put it. For Fraser, an artwork is not just the object or performance itself, or even its production and exhibition; it includes its distribution. For this reason, she is keen to control the way her work moves through the world.

“Andrea was really ambivalent about exhibiting the video. It took a lot of coaxing to get her consent,” says Bankowsky. He frowns at the monitor as the artist climbs on top of the collector. Rather than exhibiting the sixty-minute video, Fraser often distributes stills of the encounter alongside a shot of the video installation and the original press release. Bankowsky dislikes this strategy. “It willfully neuters the piece and turns it into an archival exercise,” he says. Watching
Untitled
is a visceral and emotional experience in a way that looking at the six stills is not. “Andrea’s own gesture freaked her out and some of her apologists see
Untitled
as a misstep,” says Bankowsky. “But, by the criteria of ‘Pop Life,’ it is her best work.”

While Hirst is fond of launching his art with highly publicized price tags, Fraser chose not to disclose the sum paid by the collector who participated in
Untitled
. She was keen to resist the “pornographic interest in prices.” When the video was being shown at Petzel Gallery in 2003, however, the press somehow got a hold of the figure $20,000. Fraser has told me that she found it extremely painful to be publicly identified with a specific monetary value. “I was aware that the artist showing next door was selling paintings for $200,000 each. I was exposed to the art world’s steep hierarchy of value and I felt shame at being so cheap within it.”

Fraser always names her works, but she opted for the generic
Untitled
in this instance. “‘Untitled’ is a precious art-world convention,” says Bankowsky as we walk out of the alcove. “It suggests that the work is so self-sufficient, so replete, that it doesn’t need the supplement of a title.” In Fraser’s hands, “Untitled” becomes an emphatic label, a witty spoof of all the artworks that go by the name. Somehow, by acting out and controlling a situation in which the moneyman fucks her, she purifies herself of his corrupting influence. If many artists are deemed to be whoring themselves nowadays, perhaps Fraser is one who didn’t.