The Emperors Club Whored Artists, Too
Modern art is more or less indistinguishable from prostitution, but every now and then something happens to make that relationship a little less symbolic and a little more literal. Emperors Club, the high-priced call girl outfit that provided Eliot Spitzer and countless other wealthy elites with classy sex, also hooked the same wealthy clients up with classy art. According to Artnet: "As it turns out, the company that ran Emperors Club VIP, the Emperors Publishing Media Group, also runs a parallel website titled Emperors Club Contemporary Art." Millionaires and billionaires who signed up with the service would supposedly gain access to "exclusive auctions" of works by folks like Jeff Koons and Andrew Wyeth.
Some of the artists mentioned on the Emperors Club site (which is still live, and which is amusingly identical to their whoring site) were contacted by Artnet. They had no clue they had awesome seven-diamond profiles on this escort service's art page. They also weren't too surprised, of course, because, yeah, making it as an artist pretty much already is whoring.
Success is about sex appeal and convincing rich people to spend considerably more money than reasonable people might expect on you. For the buyers, it's not about the pleasure of the act or the object itself so much as the power, and the status.
All of this is patently obvious of course, which is why that one artist actually auctioned herself off for sex, that one time. Right? Was that a real thing, or an "art" thing? Or did we see it in some bitingly satirical movie?
