In 2003, the performance artist Andrea Fraser made Untitled, a sixty-minute video recording of herself having sex with an unidentified art dealer at the Royalton Hotel in New York. To participate in the artwork and buy a copy of the film, the dealer paid an amount that was incorrectly reported, at the time, to be around $20,000. Fraser never disclosed the actual sum; to her, the symbolic importance lay in the fact of the transaction, not its amount. Nonetheless, the rumored price became an obsession. She told T: The New York Times Style Magazine, in 2019, “So that’s what was the most painful for me, being exposed publicly in the art economy as cheap.” Cheap for the art world, it’s true, but wildly expensive for prostitution.

Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)