More about Michael Jackson (Fucked Up), Silicon
Contributor
The art world will never be the stuffy charade of sipping chardonnay and pretentious art speak when Paul McCarthy is in the building.
Nope, when McCarthy is around, there is bound be at least one of these things running through your mind:
- That’s a giant shit!
- Maybe I need a new sex toy
- RUN!
In sculptures like this one though, we can see McCarthy has more to offer the world than an odd obsession with things that go both in and out of ones butt. In the early 90s, McCarthy started focusing on the peculiar idea of the merging of childhood innocence with adult perversion. And thus the world was given gems such as a rabbit action figure with a such a long penis that it coiled around its feet on the floor. While this sculpture is unmistakably less vulgar, it explores the exact same ideas.
This piece is a spin-off of Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture. Koon’s version, while freaky in its own right, is an ode to MJ’s somewhat endearing peculiarities and his steadfast love for his sidekick Bubbles, a chimpanzee he saved from a research laboratory in Texas. Koons’s pristine and romanticized sculpture is a celebration of the pop star's fame and life. McCarthy on the other hand, took the piece in a slightly different direction. He has recreated MJ and Bubbles in a very crude and dark manner, thus suggesting the more contested side of Jackson’s reputation, notably, his rumored obsession with little boys. And there you have it, youthful innocence colliding with mature sexual debauchery. Now that's a recipe for a lawsuit.
One would think that when pedophilia meets a knock off in the arts, as this sculpture undeniably does, people wouldn't care much for it. Wrong. There are four versions of this sculpture, and when one of them came up for auction recently, it sold for over $2 million! Between McCarthy’s unrefined sensibilities and the glorification of Jackson’s darker side, it makes you wonder about the type of person who would gladly drop two mil on this work. Ah, if only Freud were around to see this, he would have such a heyday.
