“Shove it up your ass”: Dahn Vo’s bitter words to his art collector
“I’m very childish,” Vietnamese artist Danh Vo once claimed. “When people want to put me in boxes, I go the other way.” Vo’s body of work, often comprised of reclaimed appropriations of other artists’ work, seemed to interrogate the meaning of belonging and ownership. Once, when promised a one-man show at the Fridericianum, he decided to entirely remake the Statue of Liberty on a whim. He made it, in its 305 feet entirety, but left it wholly deconstructed.
The process took five years and was entirely bankrolled by an art collector who was vying to buy the piece named We the People. Despite the staggering cost, which is said to be more than $1.5million, Vo only let her keep a third of the disparate elements. The rest were scattered around museums and galleries around the world. It’s a commentary on freedom, how it can be omnipresent – there were 300 separate pieces involved – but more accessible to a select few.
While his art touched on power struggles and ownership, it’s often how he dealt with collectors of his work that captured his feelings best. At its best, the artist-patron relationship allows the creative’s crucial financial freedom, the promise of a commission that allows them space to breathe and focus solely on their art until it’s completed. But often, the financial side becomes tangled. Artists become cash cows, and collectors see each other as enemies.
The legal battle that erupted between Vo and collector Bert Kreuk is one of the best examples of this dynamic at its most sour. In 2014, the Dutch collector sued Vo for $1.2m, claiming the artist had failed to produce a commission for the Transforming the Known exhibition at The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum.
Vo denied it, insisting they’d never reached a formal agreement. Eventually, a judge ruled in Kreuk’s favour, and Vo was ordered to produce work within the year. Kreuk made it known he would prefer a piece of a larger scale, and although Vo agreed, he responded with a scathing letter.
“I will have my father, Phung Vo, execute a site-specific wall work, in which he writes out the following sentence indicated below; it is a line delivered by the demon from the film The Exorcist, which – as you may know – constitutes a source of inspiration for my latest body of work,” he wrote, almost earnestly.
Adding: “You may voice your preferences with regard to its design (as far as a selection of fonts and colours are concerned) and manifestation to the extent it will become as impressive and large as you find fitting for the amount of $350,000: Shove it up your ass, you f***ot.”
The case raged on for a while, but his legal team reached a settlement, and Kreuk later dropped the suit. While it’s one of the most comically dramatic examples of the artist-patron relationship gone awry, it brings a few things into focus. Collectors rely on the wit and commentary artists can provide in their work, but when that is channelled towards them, they baulk. Artists are not famed for their mild-mannered temperaments, and to rely on them to generate income requires you don’t paint them into a corner and force them to create – lest they tell you to shove it up your ass.
