For an artist who once persuaded his agent to spend a month dressed as a giant pink phallus, getting two New York police officers to stand on their heads in a gallery should have been easy.
In fact, Frank and Jamie, precariously balanced under the anxious gaze of a security guard at Christie’s in New York, are waxworks by Maurizio Cattelan, one of the art world’s pranksters.
The jokes of the self-taught Italian artist, who in his young and poor days worked as a postman, a mortuary attendant and donated sperm, are becoming very serious: Frank and Jamie are expected to fetch up to $1,8-million in a sale tomorrow which includes two other Cattelan pieces, Ostrich, estimated to be worth up to $1,6-million, and Mini Me, a self-portrait of the artist peering nervously from a shelf of art books, up to $450 000.
The police officers, authority turned on its head, are from the same series as his sculpture of the Pope felled by a meteorite, which provoked protests from Catholics at some exhibitions. Cattelan has also attracted the rage of animal lovers for taxidermy pieces, including The Ballad of Trotsky, a stuffed horse hanging from the ceiling in a harness, which sold for more than $2-million last year. The Pope went for a mere $900 000 three years ago.
The two-day sale of postwar and contemporary art, expected to bring in well over $188-million, is a spectacular assembly. It includes paintings by Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and a major 1956 painting by Philip Guston, The Street, not seen in public for over 40 years. There are also works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder, Donald Judd and Jeff Koons. – Guardian Unlimited Â