Wade Guyton May Be Torpedoing His Own Sales

Tonight’s contemporary-art sale at Christie’s, called “If I Live I'll See You Tuesday,” should be unremarkable, insofar as it's selling the same artists who always appear at contemporary-art auctions. There’s a twist, though: Christie's is trying to tout this sale as hardcore, dangerous. The house made a slick promo video featuring professional skateboarder Chris Martin and a soundtrack by Awolnation, in which we see Martin snake his way through storage bins, salesrooms, and freight elevators, giving high-fives to black workers and nodding to others preparing works on their way to auction. Martin glides in slo-mo past art featured in the sale: work by Christopher Wool, Wade Guyton, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Dan Colen, Cady Noland, John Currin, and other blue-chip names. Christie's crows that this sale has been "curated" by an in-house person named Loic Gouzer and that it seeks to represent "the gritty and underbelly-esq [sic] side of Contemporary Art ... tough, controversial ... built around a mood and an atmosphere ...to convey the darker side of what art can be." I say it’s just a bullshit ploy to massage client egos and reel in rubes.

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