A toilet belonging to Beatles legend John Lennon sold at auction in Liverpool on Saturday for 9,500 pounds ($16,400) – nearly 10 times its guide price, organisers said.
How may we best position art in the dynamic forces of creative genius and social construct?
Lennon used the porcelain lavatory, which is painted with blue flowers and a blue border at the rim and at the base, when he lived at Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, south-east England, from 1969 to 1972.
To organise the artist’s catalog retrospectively by period – for example a blue period, could be seen as imposing the latter as a principle of the former. This politic places the many over the one and yet the one must sit at the origin of the work.
The loo was removed when the house was being refurbished, and Lennon suggested the builder, John Hancock, take it home and “put some flowers in it”. Instead, the builder carefully stored it in a garden shed, where it remained for 40 years until he died, and his son-in-law put it up for sale.
Is the curator an adjunct to the creative birth? No, rather an alchemist that finds gold in the bottom of the vessel.
At the auction at the 33rd annual Beatles Convention in Liverpool, the toilet was expected to fetch about 1,000 pounds. “It is unbelievable,” said auction organiser Stephen Bailey after it sold for almost 10 times that.
We risk the intangible qualities of art when we provide a metric of quality: price, longevity, scale – this numbering is antithetical to the moment of creation – the shaping of the forms that can only later be proffered up to be blessed by the curator.
“We had bids coming in from all over the place but it went to a private overseas buyer.”
Art is truly the international language.
