The BBC has an interesting report today about a man who has an elaborate full-back tattoo that, though it’s attached to his body, he’s sold to an art collector. Yeah, that’s one’s hard to wrap your head around. Let’s put in another way. The man, Tim Steiner, earned $161,000 from German art collector Rik Reinking for rights to the piece. As part of the deal Steiner is required to sit shirtless in a gallery three times a year as a piece of living art, which isn’t a bad way to make extra cash, we suppose. Especially when some of the exhibitions have occurred at the Louvre in Paris, Civita di Bagnoregio in Rome, the Art Farm in Beijing, and the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania.
And as befits all good art, the exhibitions will continue even posthumously. After Steiner shuffles off this mortal coil, Reinking takes full ownership of his skin, which will be removed so the tattoo can be framed and displayed. Some people, not surprisingly, have called the unusual arrangement ghoulish, but those people perhaps have no idea how strange modern art can get. Steiner, who sees himself as merely a temporary mounting for the tattoo, is happy, if not exactly eager, to be immortalized on museum walls. He considers tattooing the ultimate art form. “Painting on canvas is one thing,” he says, “painting on skin with needles is a whole other story.”
hide isn’t really new. The pigs may be getting the better deal, though. They get to root around in mud and slop to their heart’s content until they die of old age. Steiner still presumably has to earn a living a somehow. He probably should have had the pigs’ lawyer negotiate his agreement.We like tattoo art, but this skinning business is obviously a practice that’s legitimized by social status. Put someone’s framed epidermis on your wall at home and you’re anything from seriously weird to a psychopath/subject of a murder inquiry; hang it in a gallery and wine swilling upper crusty types call you a collector. But that’s sort of an encapsulation of how the entire world works, isn’t it? Rob an old lady at a cash machine and you’re a thief; take away her pension and you’re a politician. Heavy drug usage in the ghetto is a crime wave; heavy drug usage in suburbia is a public health problem. We can do this all day, but we’ll move on.
