TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT (WHAT YOU REALLY REALLY WANT)

Auction curation for Bonham’s

2015 was a special time in the auction business and for me personally. While I had recently changed careers from a curator to a specialist at an auction house, it was also a time when “curated” auctions were being developed. In today’s auctions, it’s quite common for sales to feature newer practices (and seeing those generate in some cases very significant prices). Back in 2015, that was not the case. So as a curator, I wanted to present something different—not only an auction but a larger event, catalog, and offerings. 

The title – Tell me what you want (what you really, really want) – referencing a text by German philosopher Jan Verwoert, (and the Spice Girls) right away set the tone. It was too long, too pop, too academic, too literal, too LA, but perfect for being intriguing and a little subversive. 

One of the centerpieces of Tell Me What You Want was the private sale offering of LA artist, Ry Rocklin’s Ping Pong Table from his Trophy Modern series where he makes sculptures of pragmatic objects from common modular trophy parts ordered from catalogs. This work became the proxy for the auction itself and I had the idea to print the titles on ping pong paddles which looked remarkably similar to auction paddles. I hired two professional ping pong players to come in and play an exhibition game on the table during the preview party sponsored by the LA cultural magazine, Flaunt.  

An auction after all is a sport, a tournament of sorts with spectators where one competitor develops a strategy and competes against another. Each competitor must quite literally tell the auctioneer what they want. The artwork goes to the highest bidder—a trophy of sorts in this unique way in which art is sold…but why so serious? Perhaps why don’t we have a little fun with it all at the same time.

Photos courtesy of Bonham’s and Flaunt Magazine