Bizarre, International, Media

Unmade Bed Goes For Over Three Million Dollars At Art Auction

Artist Tracey Emin said that she had an idea after a long bout in bed during a stressful relationship period. After four days, she looked at the bed and discarded vodka bottles and cigarette butts and decided that she had created art.  Many would say that her work is not art but an unmade bed. However, the work was put on the shortlist in 1999 for the prestigious Turner Prize and it has now been auctioned off for  £2.546 million.  That is over three million dollars for Emin’s unmade and stained bed.

The 1998 work also features discarded condoms and stains from bodily fluids.  It was originally purchased by art collector Charles Saatchi who was seeking between £800,000 and £1.2 million.  Like Emin, he has now made a windfall profit from the bed . . . and its anonymous new owner.  If you find all of this perfectly bizarre, you are not alone.  The work divided critics with some crying foul.

What kills me is that with four kids, including three teenagers, I have been sitting on a gold mine.

34 thoughts on “Unmade Bed Goes For Over Three Million Dollars At Art Auction”

  2. So there is a chance Town and Country, might want to picture my 1 bathroom rambler in their latest Magazine?
    I have arrived!

    It’s a Mad, Mad World.

  5. Turley hit the bull’s eye! The art world is corrupt. The art apparatchiks are corrupt. The NEA should be abolished because of its egregious failure to even attempt some sort of objectivity regarding its selections. If it’s a huge banana, then somehow it is deemed art, and placed in the public square. If it’s a huge photo, then it must be a great photo…
    G. Tod Slone, Ed.
    The American Dissident

  7. Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist of the ‘avant-gard’ era, canned his own sh*t (Isn’t it amazing that you can’t print certain words) and sold it. He canned his own breath and other stuff. He was making a statement regarding the emerging question, ‘What is art?’. An early answer to that question was that art is something only the artist could do. Now it is anything someone calling themselves an artist can think up; if someone pays for it.

    1. issac – Frank Lloyd Wright basically said that if someone pays for it, it is art.

  8. Cigarette smoking is dangerous. A hazard to you health. Does that mean anything to you?
    Then….

    —
    Ok fans. Who wrote those words as the lead in to his famous song? Hint: He is from an island.

    1. Paul, apparently his famous shark has started to decay. Too bad – I like his quirky stuff and would have enjoying seeing it =)

      Also, the money is not going to Emin – it goes to Saatchi. She shoulda held out, probably needed cash in hand like most artists

  13. Also, I would recommend the belated art critic Robert Hughes’ book or film “The Shock of the New” to understand how the convergence of art and major investment houses took place

  14. Emin’s “installation” is IMO brilliant from a conceptual POV. The contemporary art world has devolved greatly and investors like Saatchi have ratcheted up value on what could be considered “non works”. Emin caught the zeitgeist and ran with it. As an “outsider artist” or what I call submerged versus emerging or established artists I must admit I am a tad envious as I can’t even get an exhibition. But kudos to Emin and given that her work was deemed worthy of $$$ as an investment good on her.

    Speaking of artists – where is our beloved Squeek these days?

  15. I can’t decide whether I would pay more for the unmade bed or for the “flesh dress” shown here: http://www.artnet.com/artists/jana-sterbak/vanitas-flesh-dress-for-an-albino-anorectic-a-Ym5zS6keUPK3PJakYvCZyw2 . Both of them seem to be worth at least $1. Plus tax.

    May I should quit my day job and open up an art gallery, that way I would never have to make the bed. It took two idiots to bid up the price to over $2 million. Was one of them a shill?

  16. You have to love how loosely they use the term “artist” and is the Turner Prize really that prestigious”

    What came in second a toilet bowl that someone had just pinched a loaf in?

  20. They can have mine for half the price and I’ll throw the dogs bed in for nothing.

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