What would you pay for a J. Fred Muggs shot?

There seem to be no end to the number of stories on the meshugas that is the art market.

The latest is a portfolio of photos of Moscow’s Red Square that were taken in 1998. They went for a bit under $77K at auction at Sotheby’s. (Source: CBS News.)

Now, I’m not one of those folks who claim that photography can’t be art. Think Edward Steichen. Think Robert Mapplethorpe. Think Diane Arbus. Okay. Maybe not Diane Arbus. Thinking Diane Arbus might weird you out. Not that a picture of a creepy kid holding a grenade would weird anyone out. Especially if they were the fine art photo collecting type. As they say in snooty gallery, fine art collecting circles, no sirree Bob. Why, just the other day, I was asking myself whether this might not be the time to take down that photo of the golden apple that I framed up from a calendar (Sierra Club?) about 20 or 30 years ago, and replace it with an even artier shot of a kid holding a grenade. Of course, as it would be in the bedroom, I’d have to remember to turn it around to face the wall before I hopped into bed each night.

And if this shot from the Sotheby portfolio is any indication, the photos snapped up at Sotheby’s have a certain artsy charm.

It’s just that the pictures weren’t taken by a latter day Arbus, Steichen, or Mapplethorpe. They were taken by a chimp.

Not that I don’t believe that animals can be artists. Or even artistes.

Why not?

There are sentient beings at other nodes of the evolutionary network.

And as someone who’s actually met a few chimps up close and personal – albeit they were pygmy chimps, or bonobos, who are closer to us, DNA-wise, than “common chimps” like the photographer chimp are  - it’s certainly possible that some of my furry friends could have been, if not professional artists, then certainly Sunday painters. (Based on the chimps I have met, I would say that they are probably a bit to frenzied to do paint by number.)

I first read about the chimp with the candid camera  in The NY Daily News. (Yes, I admit it. I do sometimes indulge.)

Predictably, they got it a bit wrong, referring to Mikki the chimp as a monkey. (Sheesh…) Monkey or chimp, Mikki’s bio is not unimpressive.  Among other things, Mikki did a mid-career change:

…once a popular performer at the Moscow Circus — [Mikki] was taught by contemporary artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid how to snap his first Polaroid when he was 15.

He eventually graduated to a regular camera, and then, an antique. (Source: NY Daily News)

Sotheby’s is all over themselves positioning Mikki’s work as a “new perspective. They’re “akin to experimental photography and reference millions of photos taken by tourists on a daily basis.”

I’m not going to be the one that says that Mikki’s work is a mere step above feces hurling. Still, smart as chimps are, I doubt that Mikki was thinking “new perspective.”

There’s even more gush from Sotheby’s, which is not surprising. I mean, who would expect that they’d come flat out and say, “Hey, these pictures were taken by a chimp. Pretty cute, huh?”

Hifalutin is as hifalutin does.

Meanwhile, the contemporary art curator at Sotheby’s London, had this to say:

“There’s been a lot of interest because it’s very unusual and it works on so many different levels…It’s an alternative view of Moscow as seen through (an) alternative vision.”

Another Sotheby-er claims that the Mikki collection is part of a a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, pant-hoot dig at the art scene,

…meant to poke fun at the very idea of contemporary art.  “You know when people say with contemporary art, ‘I could do that,’ this really talks to that,” Jo Vickery of Sotheby’s was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying. (Source: Moscow News.)

Well, yes, it does talk to that.

Anyway, the Russian collector who bought Mikki’s work "said they showed that sometimes animals could do things better than humans.”

True that.

It would be hard to imagine a chimp, for example, forking over $77K for a bunch of inedible pictures that can’t be used as a weapon or a means of seduction.

But I do wonder what part of the $77K the artist himself actually saw.