Got a piece of art with some TV sticking to it? Call the fun-loving specialists at Phillips de Pury.
When Abdi Farah won the Bravo reality show, Work of Art, his 2010 “Baptism” went to auction at Phillips de Pury, selling for $20,000.
And now that Steve Martin has declared Stephen Colbert’s re-worked portrait, “a viable artwork” that “could be auctioned,” well: Phillips de Pury has snatched it up.
Created during a segment on The Colbert Report intended to promote guest Steve Martin’s latest book, An Object of Beauty, the portrait was gazed upon by Frank Stella, sprayed by Shepard Fairey, and then doodled upon and signed by Andre Serrano.
Asked what he’d done to improve it, Fairey told Colbert, “I made your agenda as an omnipotent quasi-fascist orator, and shaper of our politics and culture, that much more obvious as manipulation.”
In the brave company of other works of similarly dubious heft, like those of Donald Baechler and Dan Colen, Colbert’s mash-up will be on the block tomorrow. Though the Phillips de Pury site describes the collaboration in hilarious art-speak, the estimate is not ironic at $100,000.
Profits will go to DonorsChoose.org, an online charity designed to connect donors with classrooms in need.
The Art Machine 