Monday, June 14, 2004
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hooker
I have a weakness. Well, I have several weaknesses, including a love of mallowmars, E! True Hollywood specials, and any gossip about Courtney Love. But the weakness that I'm writing about today is my amusement with bad modern art. The more cynical it is, the better.
I think I've found perhaps the best example of art that is sure to offend my parents. It's Andrea Fraser's Untitled (2003).
I have a weakness. Well, I have several weaknesses, including a love of mallowmars, E! True Hollywood specials, and any gossip about Courtney Love. But the weakness that I'm writing about today is my amusement with bad modern art. The more cynical it is, the better.
I think I've found perhaps the best example of art that is sure to offend my parents. It's Andrea Fraser's Untitled (2003).
Fraser's videotape Untitled (2003) was scheduled to go on view at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea on June 10. In it, the artist is seen having sex in what some have characterized coyly as ''every imaginable position,'' with an unidentified American collector who paid close to $20,000 to participate in this curious 60-minute work of art.From an interview in TimeOut New York:
....'This is one of the most complicated pieces I've ever done,'' Fraser confessed.
TONY: So it's artist as prostitute and dealer as pimp.Damn. This is deep stuff. Fraser is part of a long tradition of risk-taking artists who do the nasty before the camera: Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, and perhaps the granddaddy of this movement, Rob Lowe. But Fraser takes it to the next level -- she distributes and sells the tape on her own. She eliminates the middleman, the internet pornographers. It's groundbreaking work.
AF: Not exactly. I did start out with that association, which goes back to Baudelaire, who said, "What is art? Prostitution." But if Untitled were simply a literalization of that idea, I don't know how interesting it would be. Prostitution remains a metaphor here. The collectors didn't pay for sex; he prebought a tape and covered production costs, which is now a common practice. It's a form of participation -- but one that's purely economic. The difference with Untitled is that is also required the collector's intimate participation in the production of the work. What he paid for the piece was more than money. He paid by taking a huge personal risk.
