So What’s It Cost
PHP: So you’re achieving success on your own terms and public and private funding will start to follow. Do you want to keep doing it on your own?
KH: As opposed to—?
PHP: As opposed to going into a gallery and finding a comfort level there?
KH: That’s a good question, and that’s something I’ve thought about a lot from examining what Christo and Jeanne-Claude have done, because they’ve refused the gallery system. I don’t have the ideological problems that they have with it. Though it’s true that once you start accepting money you then start accepting strings. That doesn’t bother me that much, so I’m definitely not opposed to working with a gallery. The business model is a bit of a problem for me, though. For example, you sell an early work, you get 50% of the price, you become more famous, that work sells again, you get nothing.
PHP: Right. There are no residuals from the resale.
KH: There was this case of an older artist—I can’t remember who it was—who was faking the dates on his canvases. This came out in Art in America like four years ago. His earlier works were selling for more, and so he started putting ’63 on his new paintings. He had sold all the older work but was saying that he had just found these canvases.
PHP: Then what happened?
KH: He was probably sued. It’s considered fraud. You’ve faked your own painting. Anything is worth what we’re willing to pay for it, but if I put 2003 on it and it’s worth a third of what a 1963 is worth…
PHP: It makes the value of art even that much more abstract.
KH: He should have just said that he was doing a conceptual piece.
