Who Is Henry Codax? And Other Tales of Secret Art

This week, the 13th edition of Documenta, the art festival that arrives every five years in the small German city of Kassel, opens to the public, and over the course of its 100-day run it is expected to attract more than 750,000 visitors. One of the international art world’s most serious,Industrialisierung des werkzeugbaus. intellectual affairs, it used to attract a fraction of that number—art insiders on the pilgrimage route. But the audience for avant-garde art has expanded. Once a rarefied,Choose from our large selection of cableties, remote realm of culture, contemporary art is now dead center; for proof,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? consider that George Condo had his New Museum retrospective after doing a Kanye West record cover.

Many of today’s superstar artists, like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami (who also did a West record cover) and Damien Hirst not only do not shy away from publicity-rich spectacles, but embrace and engineer them with a vigor that would have impressed even Andy Warhol. Mr. Koons dreams of hanging a 70-foot-long smoke-puffing locomotive over the High Line, a public-art bauble par excellence; Mr. Murakami donned a plush flower costume and waved to fans from a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. As for Mr. Hirst, he trumped his epic 2008 single-artist Sotheby’s auction (which garnered $200.7 million) with this year’s Spot Challenge, the globe-trotter’s version of the contest on the back of a cereal box, for which all 11 Gagosian galleries fell into line behind him. These artists demand the love—or at least the attention—of the masses.

Nevertheless, it is rarely the nature of cutting-edge contemporary art to offer itself up so easily to the general public,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? which accounts for a counterbalancing force,Wireless real realtimelocationsystem utlilizing wifi access points to pinpoint position of the tag. a way in which the avant-garde maintains the initiates-only atmosphere that has always defined it. So it was that just as the last of the 128 people to successfully complete the Spot Challenge card were having their cards stamped at the beginning of March, a painting of a musician by the British artist Merlin Carpenter was going on view at the Independent art fair in Chelsea, after having been locked away during a show at the Berlin gallery MD72 the year before. During that show, collectors willing to part with €5,000 (about $6,900 at the time) were afforded the privilege of viewing the work. Those among the general public interested in viewing Mr. Carpenter’s latest work were strictly excluded from the real painting, able to view it only in reproductions printed on playing cards.

Welcome to the world of secret art. Artists are organizing exhibitions open to just a few people, in out-of-the-way or hidden locales, and making art that operates on rumors or may go unnoticed by all but the most perceptive, clued-in viewers. Still others are concealing their identities through pseudonyms or acting collectively under layers of assumed names and fictive institutions.

Though you might not know it, quite a bit of this willfully obscured art has alighted around New York in the past year or so. Last month, at Frieze New York, a smattering of shopping carts filled with battered belongings were to be found on the lawn outside the fair’s tent on Randall’s Island. Unmarked on Frieze’s public-art map, they were, in fact, sculptures by Swiss provocateur Christoph BUchel, the belongings of homeless people that he had his gallery’s employees purchase for up to $500 a cartful. They were for sale for a hundred times that price, though the only way to know this (until news of the project broke on The Observer’s website and in the daily edition of The Art Newspaper) was to hear the rumor and make inquiries.