6/14/2004:
"My first thought was, If I'm going to have to sell it, I might as well sell it,'' the artist Andrea Fraser said last week, speaking from a downtown studio. Fraser was referring in a starkly literal sense to her work's medium: a fit 38-year-old brunette in a sexy red V-necked dress, who is in fact herself. 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.
As ''Untitled'' begins, Fraser enters a hotel room, her hair swept fetchingly to one side. The setting is standard-issue Hip Hotel: the videotape was filmed, using a single overhead camera, in a room Fraser identified as being at the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan, owned by Ian Schrager. The artist is carrying two glasses, white wine in her left hand and what looks like a highball in her right. The collector enters, and then begins a filmed seduction whose detailed contractual terms were worked out in advance by the artist's gallery. Among the requirements for participation in ''Untitled'' were that the artist's potential collaborator be heterosexual, unmarried and, of course, willing to underwrite the transaction. ''All of my work is about what we want from art, what collectors want, what artists want from collectors, what museum audiences want,'' Fraser explained. ''By that, I mean what we want not only economically, but in more personal, psychological and affective terms.''
It would be easy to conclude that Fraser's intellectual apparatus might have cooled the ardor of the most passionate suitor. That it did not may say less about Fraser's persuasiveness than about the seductive spell that contemporary art-making seems to cast. For Fraser, ''Untitled'' was, she explained, ''not a literalization of what is, in fact, a very old metaphor, that selling art is prostitution,'' a point that was made with pithy precision by Baudelaire.
Far from being the first artist to use her body as a medium for producing art or polemics, Fraser is one in a long -- if not in every case distinguished -- line of provocateurs. Back in the 1970's, Carolee Schneemann pulled a paper scroll out of her vagina at a performance, and Hannah Wilke adorned her body with sculptural multiples of vulvas cast in hardened chewing gum. A decade later, the performance artist Karen Finley smeared her naked torso with chocolate syrup and publicly performed acts -- using a yam -- that are not advisable to mention in these pages. For many years, Annie Sprinkle, a sex worker turned artist, gave performances at which she invited members of the audience to examine her cervix through a speculum.
 
Selected Comments:
 
Carolee Schneemann she isn't
- Porn is porn

where can i get a copy?
- hard-on

The lady in RED
Exhibitionist in MURPHY BED
Thither she LED
Him to the BED
Oh that lady in RED....
- Miami Mike

I'm glad the photo was taken BEFORE the ART.
- 7T'sSoFla

By this logic, TheSpyder has a case full of about 80 gigs of art.
- King Chicken

I don't remember what I've typed before. Maybe I didn't respond before. I wish I was the ice queen, who's so f'king hot I would follow her onto a show called "Fear Factor Jr: The Explotative Years." I wish I had a picture of her that didn't make me recall that angry weightlifting chick... she was too angry to be cold. I just tend to think of Tilda Swinton. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Mmmmmmmmm.... Sexy beast indeed.
- Maybe a littel drunk.

Yeah but does it beat the Paris Hilton video?
- Brussels

I think she's going to take good care of that highball.
- Curiouser and curiouser, quipped her clitoris.
ART!
(63 Votes- 51% Art, 49% Porn)

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