Fabergé is in the news for all the right reasons, with the sale of its Winter Egg at Christie’s on Tuesday resulting in a record-breaking price at auction, a delighted collector and a thrilled auction house. It’s the perfect start to what Christie’s calls ‘Classic Week’. And news about an item made by the contemporary incarnation of Fabergé has caught Rakewell’s attention too. A man in New Zealand has been charged with theft after allegedly swallowing an egg-shaped locket. At £14,600, this egg was somewhat less expensive than its Imperial cousin, which fetched £22.9m, but it might well have been tempting fate. It was named the Octopussy egg, after the James Bond film of the same name, which centres on the attempted theft of a Fabergé egg.
This news from New Zealand has set Rakewell to wondering what other works of art have seen the inside of a digestive tract. There is, of course, another tale with a Hollywood connection. Elizabeth Taylor, legendary for her jewellery habit, was once visited by a specialist from Sotheby’s while she was on a trip to London. The specialist had brought with him the Peregrina pearl – which had counted among its owners Philip II of Spain, Margaret of Austria, Napoleon III and the Duke of Abercorn – since her husband, Richard Burton, was hoping to buy it for her for Valentine’s Day. Taylor had brought her dogs with her, but in order to get round the UK’s six-month animal quarantine laws, the viewing took place on her yacht in the middle of the Thames. During the viewing the pearl – famously heavy – was dropped and eaten by one of the dogs. Everyone – just like the police in Auckland recently – had to wait for its re-emergence.
Perhaps it is the waiting that separates art from expensive trinkets. Most critics tend not to focus on the alimentary aspect of Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), where a diminishing pile of sweets represent the depleting weight of González-Torres’s boyfriend as he died from AIDS. But the sweets do end up in the digestive tract and no one waits around to see the results. When entrepreneur Justin Sun ate Maurizio Cattelan’s banana-based artwork Comedian (2019) after paying $6.2m for it at auction, perhaps its consumption allowed more artistically minded observers to ponder the nature of how we digest art.
