Oops. I Left My Millions at Home. An interloper investigates Sothebys +
Take, for instance, the bearded 20-something gentleman who was standing next to me at the Sotheby’s preview. We were both marveling at Andy Warhol’s portrait of Liz Taylor, being sold by Steven A. Cohen, the head of SAC Capital Advisors, the firm that days earlier had agreed to pay the United States government $1.2 billion in fines for insider trading. The painting is noteworthy for its fluorescent chartreuse background and the overripeness of Ms. Taylor’s carmine lips. I posited, “You’d almost have to be gay to have that in your house.”
He smiled and said, “Or it would make you gay.”
At the Christie’s brunch, upon meeting Capucine Milliot, the auction house’s thin, stylish 30-something vice president, head of communications, postwar and contemporary art, I exclaimed, “I’ve always wanted to meet someone named Capucine! Do your close friends call you Cap’n?” Ms. Milliot replied, “It’s Capu, usually.”
I also chatted up a young woman at the Christie’s brunch about the irony of someone potentially spending $5 million on Warhol’s portrait of the founder of the People’s Republic of China. Just then, an older European woman, seeing that the younger woman and I were standing on copper tiles on the gallery floor, pointed at the tiles and asked, “It’s art?”
The younger woman said, “Yes. It’s by Carl Andre. ‘100 Copper Square.’ You’re allowed to walk on it.” Forming a moue with her mouth, the older woman said, “I’d rather not” and then swerved as if avoiding an overzealous dachshund.
It was also heartening to find that bidders seemingly didn’t care whether I was at the auctions in order to bid or not. In Christie’s jampacked reception area before Tuesday’s sale, an elegant bidder in her 60s asked me, “Do you collect?”
Anxious not to be perceived as an interloper in these rarefied climes, I told her, “Mostly I’m going through a period of deaccession now. I’m heavy in mixed-media, found-object stuff. I’d say ‘outsider art,’ but that would suggest an actual artist was involved.”
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