Carlos Ginzburg's 'What Is Art? Prostitution' Performance Analyzed by Marcela Iacub

Carlos Ginzburg's performance 'What Is Art? Prostitution' Baudelaire has been staged four times over 36 years, with the latest iteration presented on October 2, 2010, during Nuit Blanche in Paris at 3e Rue Galerie. The work features a woman holding a placard with Baudelaire's quote "What is art? Prostitution." The first edition took place in 1974 at the ICC in Antwerp, where an actual prostitute held the sign and returned to the port at night. The second was in 2006 at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, with an actress nude behind the placard. The third occurred in July 2010 at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires, with a model. For the Paris edition, the gallerist herself played the prostitute behind a window evoking Amsterdam's red-light district, and the performance was free and open to the public, funded by the City of Paris, with simultaneous projections in Brussels and New York at White Box. Legal scholar Marcela Iacub, a CNRS research director, wrote an essay for the occasion, exploring the equivalence between art and prostitution as articulated by Baudelaire. Iacub argues that the performance transforms viewers into a public, akin to clients of prostitutes, and that the pleasure derived from art is collective and anonymous, not individual. The work challenges the notion of private enjoyment, positing that both art and prostitution offer a jouissance of the multitude.