60 minutes rewind it may have escaped your notice but recently a vacuum cleaner just like this one and the one down in your basement was sold for a hundred thousand dollars also a sink went for one hundred and twenty one thousand and a pair of urinals for a hundred and forty thousand dollars all of the above and even more unlikely stuff is art that's what the artists say the dealers and of course the people who lay out good money it all may make you believe in the wisdom of PT Barnum that there's a sucker born
every minute the noble auction house of saud amis in new york last november the long anticipated winter sale of Contemporary Art and here it is folks about two hundred and forty two they get heard Richter please know that the measurements for this Walker reversed it's actually a horizontal painting I'm sorry it's actually a vertical painting 78 by 59 inches and we start here at a fifty thousand dollars per day I start here at ten thousand dollars but it's not ten thousand 1 million eight hundred thousand nine at 1 million nine I have 1 million nine
hundred thousand now say 2 million this one a canvas of scrolls done with the wrong end of a paintbrush bears the imaginable title of untitled it's by side Twombly and were sold for two million one hundred and forty five thousand dollars and that's dollars not Twombly and twenty thousand dollars start this now a twenty thousand dollars there were bargains rat repeated three times reached 30,000 sold 30,000 your sir and Greengrass the words not the plant went for thirteen thousand so and seven hundred the auction itself was a glittering affair a bank of phones connected Paris
Geneva Frankfurt and London among the hottest items lot number 72 this is sold from the catalogue Jeff Koons inspired work three basketballs submerged in a fish tank so 150,000 dollars giving new meaning to slam dunk Wow dr. J and back in his New York studio Jeff Koons has more where that came from and a slightly shaky version of what it all means this is an ultimate state of being I one wanted to play with people's desires that they desired disequilibrium they desired pre-birth or what did he say the language is art speak the same pitch
that convinced the emperor to buy a new clothes or waterlogged basketballs I was giving a definition of life and death this is the eternal this is what life is like also after death aspects of the eternal Jeff Koons is a genuine phenomenon still in his 30s he's become a millionaire since he moved from commodity broker on Wall Street to art mongering to the world he doesn't actually paint or sculpt he Commission's craftsmen to do that or he goes shopping for basketballs and vacuum cleaners what makes them art Jeff I always liked the anthropomorphic quality they're
like lungs so this object now is just free to eternally just to display its newness its integrity of birth so what do you say to the man he said fool you hadn't paid $100,000 I just got a genuine Koons for 80 bucks this work would be assigned work by myself or would have a letter of authenticity he's already had a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art do you think he's making fun of he's making fun of the art world no no he's making his money off there to bring these closer I'm saying
we need here and we still don't have we need out for his ps2 assistance last year he hired platoons of German workmen to erect a 40-foot puppy made of flowers in the art world cheer it's very much about something extremely banal made into something terrifically heroic and important and so it kind of bespeaks of our own sense of ego at certain moments in our life of course most of this art of the 90s would be worthless junk without the hype of the dealers and even more important the approval of the critics they write in language
that to this viewer anyway sounds important but might as well be in Sanskrit of the American artist Julian Schnabel a critic wrote his is an eschatological art appropriating the master meanings of life and the master languages of art to reassert the sense of hurt and loss that evades both a book on Christopher wolf the rat rat rat man said of his work they communicate not like facile appropriations but as a home perfectionist idea of that discourse reduced to the irreducible then starting all over again arts magazine said of Robert Gerber who specializes in arms legs
sinks and urinals installations function as utopian and dystopian spaces the tableau arrests and its own stillness suspends social time and if you're still stumped let jeffrey Deitch critic dealer and fan explain this work in particular shows something of the uncertainty in which artists find themselves today in the human sphere they don't quite know exactly where they stand so simple when you think about it as simple as one of mr. goobers your nose a major New York art collector Elaine dan Heiser has three all in a row they look like urinals but they really aren't I
know because there's no plumbing attached to them but beyond that does it comment on society in some way I do you think I think it comments on things that we take for granted and that we really don't see that is Robert Ryman and that is it's a white rectangle right and Ryman has reduced painting to its very essence and a lot of people don't understand that but I confess this one well some of his work has a little more texture in it this one is a little flatter because he really has reduced it he's a
minimal artist and I would say so now this intrigues me yes this is a young artist by the name of Felix gonzalez-torres man touch it you can as a matter of fact you allowed their candies they're Italian candies and one is allowed to take shake them the one would reduce the value well then you just replace them I said yes in my observation art critic Hilton Cramer says the people who buy this stuff are victims of a trashy hoax just the act of spending that money on an object makes them feel that they are collaborating
in creating the art history of their time but is it also a case of the Emperor's clothes oh it's largely a case of the Emperor's clothes but they don't see it that way when I look at almost all contemporary art I see nothing nothing Brian sue Oh a London critic is appalled no other word for it imagine the outrage of a man steeped in the work of the Masters when he witnessed at an auction the sale of a can of excrement the work and waste of the artist Piero Manzoni I suppose you could argue that
he was making as it were a symbolic statement contemporary art his feces there was a painting if that's the word at the solar beam sale by a man named wool Chris wolf I think and it was the word rat repeated three times art I think we're lucky to have the word and we might just have had a blank canvas that's pretty commonplace now it's a standard assumption in the art world today that a work of art is anything an artist is it is and an artist is somebody who calls himself an artist and there are
no other tests I don't understand it one scrap I don't understand it at all when that's gone we don't belong to this generation we mistreat our the dealers lust after the hyperbole and a few years ago they struck pure gold when jean-michel basquiat came on the scene his work giant childishly rock graffiti sent the art world into spasm jean-michel was heaven-sent for height the story was that this poor black kid was discovered on the street by Andy Warhol the fact was he came from an upper middle-class suburban family and had a keen eye for the
marketplace but the legend stuck and his work started selling for as much as a quarter of a million dollars per graffito then in 1988 when his popularity was declining his career was saved he died of a drug overdose and now that there would be no more baskets the market fell in love with him all over again he was officially declared genius last fall when the Whitney Museum in New York honored him with a retrospective you think you could do as well yeah but that looks like what could you draw better than that it was packed
with people and it resounded with art speak so it has this multiplicity of potential meanings doesn't mean any one of them it may not mean a thing not have said it better myself at $170,000 sure now at 170 170 the Hammers down on the last lot the end of a successful evening yes we were extremely pleased with the sale total sales 20 million two hundred and sixty four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars and until the checks come in the treasures wait inside of a storeroom it is in a way a little like your basement
the bits and pieces of a lifetime is that ladder for climbing or is it for appreciating and that faucet we all have one of those it's surely a neglected bit of plumbing at Sotheby's but no it's a genuine Yan giveth bid up to $7,500 a bargain or junk soon to be consigned to the trash heap of art history Hilton Kramer is certain many of these artists as I well know live in great dread of waking up one morning and finding that it's all disappeared that somebody blew the whistle and they're no longer going to be
considered important that all the vacuum cleaner does is pick up dirt all the vacuum cleaner does is pick up dirt and with the day Coons his vacuum cleaner goes back to being a vacuum cleaner then the curtain comes down
