The sale that Loic Gouzer, Christie’s deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art, put together at 5 p.m. Sunday, the first of five successive spring evening auctions, at first seemed reckless, filling a catalog with challenging, even disturbing work. With a kneeling Hitler and a wooden grid of potatoes, it was a far cry from the auction staples that can be counted on to command high prices.
* As a young man I worked in an art gallery in Belgravia (i.e. one of the snobbiest parts of London) and I can confirm that the people who buy this rubbish are regarded as a joke, albeit a highly profitable one, by the people selling it. The same attitude prevails among the ‘artists’ churning out said rubbish, very few of whom have any talent beyond a hypertrophied gift for bullshitting.
* I love that the potato thing didn’t sell. Too subtle. You need to hit(ler) these people people over the head. A man with an Auschwitz tattoo being sodomized with a cross. A Madonna with a Down syndrome Christ pissing in his mothers mouth or perhaps the Madonna performing a coat-hanger abortion. Those would be “powerful” pieces.
