Right sock? Or left? Enshrined in a stylish case at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the man's knee-high sock looks pretty ordinary. But if it's the right sock, it sold for $3,047 at a Sotheby's auction in Amsterdam last year. If it's the left sock? Well, that one fetched $3,324 at the same sale.
"I have no idea which it is," laughed David Little, the museum's photography curator. The sock once clad a leg of Arno Verkade, a Paul Newman look-alike and Sotheby's auctioneer who literally sold the clothes off his back -- and legs -- in a charity auction that became the subject of a very droll video called "Strip the Auctioneer."
Installed at the entrance to "Embarrassment of Riches," a show of contemporary images of wealth and power, the pricey sock is a bizarre emblem of the financial follies of recent years. With its international reach, conspicuous displays and stratospheric prices for ephemeral trinkets, the art world exemplifies decadence, a fact that is not lost on Little.
"As a critique of the art world, the sock is so classic because it's also about the emperor having no clothes," he said.
"Embarrassment" features just 21 photos and two videos. Images range from portraits of plutocrats in gilded salons to sweeping views of the Kuwait stock exchange, Los Angeles teens in a hot tub, a Chanel fitting room, Shanghai automobile sales girls and a billboard-sized image of a Hamburg club. Most are unusually large, making the show seem ample despite its small quantity.
Neither overtly critical nor celebratory, the photographers in "Embarrassment" question the trappings of wealth, producing images that are sometimes ironic, often skeptical and occasionally melancholy. All of the images are open to interpretation and invite close reading and debate.
Take, for instance, Tina Barney's 2002 image "The Daughters," which presents a 40-something couple and three daughters in a Parisian salon. A thin blonde matron primps the youngest child. In the background stand the husband and an ever-so-slightly plumpish older girl whose slumped posture and unmatched dress invite over-interpretation: His child vs. hers or theirs? Unhappily blended family in posh digs? Is Mom's back-to-Dad an accident or disdainful? Might it even hint at an affair?
Some of the images are wickedly funny. British photographer Martin Parr managed a delicious send-up of crusty horse-racing fans wearing stuffy coats and bowler hats pulled down like berets. His picture of a lounge area at a Dubai polo match is quite mystifying. Whose bambino is in the high-end pink baby carriage? What's a guy in traditional white robes doing there? And who is the buxom bimbo in capri pants and shades?
