Whore or Artist?

If you put yourself into your artwork, then sell it, are you a prostitute? Was Donatello's patron, de'Medici, a pimp? Was Michelangelo a Vatican whore? I guess metaphorically you can say yes. But with Andrea Frasor you can also say literally.

Untitled,, 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission were to include a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited, sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting.

Definitely prostitution, but is it art as well? I guess you can call it that. But then you would have to call silent, unedited, sixty-minute shot of a woman being raped art. Or a murder. Interesting.

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.

Gallery Link NY Times Article