An auction of an Austrian artist's tattooed skin has been canceled after all 12 pieces were purchased by a collector for "a seven-figure sum" ahead of the event. The Wolfgang Flatz skin sale was scheduled to take place at Munich's museum of modern and contemporary art, the Pinakothek der Moderne, on February 8.
The lots were purchased by a Swiss collector, who will receive black and white photographs of the lots until they are transferred here posthumously. A remaining piece of tattooed skin will be given to the artist's son. The tattoos include the artist's name in Cyrillic and a quote from the Roman philosopher Cicero: "Dum spiro spero" (as I breathe, I hope).
The auction, titled "Being Your Own", would be led by auctioneer and Christie's president, Dirk Boll. A now-removed page on Christie's website described how "the auction thus offers a unique opportunity to acquire a significant piece of future art history, as this is the first time an artist has sold his own real body as a work of art during your life".
The event was organized as a prelude to the Munich museum's retrospective of Flatz's work, "Something Wrong with Physical Sculpture," which runs until May 2024 and includes a work that offers visitors the opportunity to throw darts at his body. An undisclosed portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to the museum's Bavarian State painting collections and the Flatz Foundation, set up by the artist to promote "artistic expression."
The sale raises some of the ethical and legal challenges related to the production, exhibition and sale of avant-garde works of art, especially the Viennese Action movement (spanning the 1960s and 1970s), with which Flatz was associated.
“There will be ethical and cultural sensitivities around the sale of skin, which is both human tissue and an organ,” says Xisca Borràs, partner in the life sciences regulatory team at British law firm Bristows. "The law does not specifically address this practice, despite efforts by the Council of Europe and different countries in Europe to prevent trafficking in human organs. And whether the artist would be able to give 'appropriate consent' given that he/she/they are being paid for tattooed skin, it's an open legal question."
Imogen Goold, professor of medical law at the University of Oxford, agrees that the legal position of such works is complicated: "Most laws cover the use of human tissue in the context of research. There is some judicial precedent, but it focuses on ownership, rather than the sale of human tissue. Surprisingly, many types of human tissue and bodily material are sold. The best example is hair for wigs. There have also been attempts to sell breast milk online. These types of sales are likely to be covered by human rights legislation. consumer, but the legality of the sale is not something the law has really considered. This is probably due to the fact that the sale of things like hair is uncontroversial. In contrast, the attempted sale of breast milk in the UK was quickly blocked , with eBay pulling the ads."
Selling fabric in an artistic context is “probably unexplored ground, legally speaking,” Goold continues. That's not to say it hasn't happened: Marc Quinn's "Self" sculpture, a head of the artist made from 9 liters of his own frozen blood, sold for £1.5 million in 2005, Imogen Goold points out.
It is also not the first time that a contemporary artist has run into the law regarding the use of human tissues and organs directly in work. Wim Delvoye sparked controversy and allegations of illegality with his tattoo of live pigs in the early 2000s, and Canadian artist Rick Gibson was convicted (under public decency laws) in 1991 for his display of earrings made from fetuses.
Major exhibitions, especially the 2009 Hauser & Wirth exhibition titled "Rite of Passage: The Early Years of Vienna Actionism, 1960-1966", curated by art historian Hubert Klocker (now manager of the estate of Otto Muehl), have enhanced understanding the movement and its ambitions. A new museum, the Wiener Aktionismus Museum (WAM), dedicated to the movement and scheduled to open next month in Vienna, also aims to take this further by making the movement "accessible to the public in all its complexity", according to the your site.