And so, years later, she asked him to plan her benefit, not knowing that he’d come up with a confab for raising money in which not a single soul was allowed to speak.
“As often happens with Maurizio, my brain eventually caught up to his. And once it did, I thought it was brilliant,” she said. “The challenge was not whether the idea worked conceptually. It absolutely did. The challenge was whether we could persuade people to get out of their comfort zone and embrace it. But honestly, that is very much what this event is about every year: asking people to suspend expectation and give themselves over to an artist’s logic for one night.”
I arrived at the Chicago Athletic Association early for a cocktail party on the roof that was hosted by the New York and Los Angeles gallery Karma, which was doing the fair for the first time. Immediately below us was that icon of Chicago public art, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, affectionately (or not) known around here as The Bean. Lake Michigan extended beyond the horizon line like an ocean. The shimmers and swoops of Frank Gehry’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion peeked out over the trees on one end, and the Art Institute’s assembly of gray boxes, as seen from the sky, were planted on the other. Speaking of the Pritzkers, a primer: John Pritzker is part-owner of the hotel that’s taken over the Athletic Association, the family has the world’s preeminent architecture prize named after them, and they are some of the city’s biggest collectors—and one of them is the governor.
After checking in at the lobby, I snagged a notebook, a necessary implement for the night, and immediately ran into Cattelan, who was wearing sunglasses indoors, a RenBen T-shirt, and a glass for champagne hanging from his neck.
“Hi, it’s Nate Freeman, from Vanity Fair,” I wrote in the notebook.
“I GOT UR QSTNS! TOO MANY!” Cattelan wrote in my notebook in response.
We conducted the interview there, in person, our pens chicken-scratching onto paper, with questions left to be answered—also silently!—in the following hours, over email. Cattelan barely gives any interviews. Has he ever conducted an interview quite like this before?
“Not in person. The closest is texting. This is slower, more exposed. You can’t hide behind tone or speed. It’s like texting, but you can’t pretend you didn’t get the message.”
You’ve used silence as a tool before—what makes saying nothing so effective sometimes?
“Silence removes shortcuts. What’s left is harder to manage, but harder to fake. Sometimes it becomes protest—like Gandhi. Saying nothing, together, can be louder than shouting. And sometimes, not speaking is the most precise way to avoid lying.”
