In NYC, they do know squat about artBidders not moved by feces on cube
By DAVID SEGAL
The Washington Post
May 20. 2005 8:00AM
It's little more than a scribble, a quick slash of ink on a 12-by-18-inch piece of plain white paper. If you saw it at the office, you might ball it up and toss it into the trash, or fold it into an airplane and fling it down the hall. It is unlikely you'd do what Christie's auction house did last week: try to sell it for $20,000.
That was the low end of the estimated price for this "ink on paper," as it was dryly described in the Christie's catalogue, by an artist living in Massachusetts named Tom Friedman. It was on display last week during the preview for the house's annual spring auction, where potential buyers and interested gawkers get a chance to sniff over the merchandise before it hits the block. Even in the often mystifying alternative universe of contemporary art - where you occasionally can't suppress philistine thoughts of the 'Wait, I could have done that' variety - this piece stood out.
There it was, amid the Warhols and Basquiats, not more than 100 feet from an Edward Hopper, hanging with the titans. "Starting an old dry pen on a piece of paper," explained the Christie's catalogue. Which is to say, this thing is exactly what it looks like.
And 20 grand seemed reasonable compared with another Friedman piece being sold at the same auction. This one, also untitled, is a two-foot white cube with a barely visible black speck set right in the middle of the top surface. To again quote Christie's, it is ".5mm of the artist's feces."
Yes, Tom Friedman put his poop on a pedestal, and last week Christie's tried to sell it, with bidding to start at $45,000. Auction season in Manhattan is a two-week spending spree of paddle-waving rich people and art dealers in Prada suits, all of them vying for highbrow booty at Christie's and its archrival, Sotheby's. The regulars were asking questions like "How much will the Hopper fetch?" and "Which house will gross more?"
But if you'd never visited Planet Expensive Art, you didn't care about that, not after you spotted those Friedmans. After that, all you could wonder is: How does an artist peddle his doody, not to mention his doodle? And here's another stumper: Who would buy it?
When it's showtime at Christie's, as it was last Wednesday night, the streets around Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan are crammed with black limousines. Nobody walks to a fine-art auction, or takes the subway or a cab. You get chauffeured to the event, then walk up a flight of stairs, and if you're a heavy hitter you're given a bidding paddle and a reserved seat, near the front of an expansive room. There's a row of bidders along one wall, all of them on the phone with collectors who are either too busy or too publicity-shy to show up in person. The art appears on a turntable at the front, or, if it's too large to fit or too small to see, on a video screen nearby. The auctioneer stands before everyone, to the right of the goodies, at a lectern.
"And one million two hundred thousand dollars starts it," said auctioneer Christopher Burge, selling a piece by artist Jeff Koons called "Small Vase of Flowers." To the untrained eye, this piece looked a lot like a small vase of flowers.
The wonder of this spectacle flows largely from the massive sums involved and how quickly the money is spent. In a busy 10 minutes, $15 million will change hands here. It's just like in the movies: The bidders motion so subtly that you hardly see them move, and when the numbers get large enough, the room starts to buzz.
"It's important to try to keep a level head," says Harry Blain, a London-based dealer and gallery owner who last week bid on multimillion-dollar paintings on behalf of several clients. "Otherwise you'll get caught up in the emotion and forget about the value, which is what the auction houses would like to have happen. It's not accidental that the whole thing is set up to be so theatrical."
Every piece has a reserve price, which eBay users know is a figure set by the owner of the art, below which he (or she) won't sell. So Christie's might start the bidding at, say, $1 million, but if the reserve is $1.3 million and the high bid is $1.1 million, the auctioneer says "passed," and the item stays with its owner. It's always a little awkward when things don't sell, so good auctioneers sort of mutter "passed," or they say it as they bang the gavel, so it's not all that obvious.
Last Wednesday, there were only a handful of passes. That was the night that big-ticket contemporary art went up for sale, including works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Lucian Freud. Total take for the evening, including commissions: $133.7 million.
Tom Friedman's pieces went up for auction the next day, during the Thursday afternoon session, along with roughly 100 other items. The estimates for these pieces are lower, but being bought and sold in the secondary art market at this level is a big deal, and at 40, Friedman is among the youngest artists.
"I'll either have an idea that will lead me to a material, or I'll see a material that will lead me to an idea," he says from his studio in Amherst. He tends to use stuff that you'd find around the house (glue, paper, Play-Doh), so that hey-I-could-do-that response is no accident. That squiggle aside, most of his work is obsessively composed. He once carved a self-portrait on an aspirin. (And it looks like him!)
For a while, the pedestal was owned by Charles Saatchi, one of the world's most famous collectors.
"I wanted to find a material that you could present the smallest amount of and it would have the most impact,"Friedman says of the piece. "I was really interested in minimalism then and with minimalism there's this sense of purity, of clean forms and geometry. I really liked the juxtaposition. The cube is logical and clean. The feces is regressive and insane."
The first time he exhibited the piece, someone thought it was a seat and sat on it. Friedman saw it happen and yelled "Stop!" but too late. He was unable to find the small, crucial part of the piece.
"I had to go home and make some more," he says.
On their big day, the Friedman items came up early. A fight for the ink scrawl started at $14,000 and within about six seconds it had sold for $26,400, including commission, to a guy in a fuchsia sweater. Then it was time for the poop on a cube, or Lot 416 as it was called by auctioneer Barbara Strongin.
"Lot 416, now showing on the screen," she said. "And $45,000 to start here. At $45,000. $48,000, at $50,000. Any advance from 50?" It might seem like someone was bidding from the way the price went up but that apparently was just the auctioneer trying to gin up interest and give the sale some forward momentum, an accepted and common tactic. There were no bidders. Strongin paused for a moment, then gave up.
"Down it goes, at $50,000," she said.
And as the white cube and the teeny dropping vanished from the screen, Strongin added a word that never in the history of fine art has ever rung so true:
"Passed."
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By DAVID SEGAL
The Washington Post
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