In this edgy work of détournement, writer and curator Bob Nickas questions and alters the artworks and captions in a Phillips auction catalogue. Blurring the boundaries between iconoclasm and iconophilia, he satirizes the absurdities of the art market by fragmenting and reassembling the catalogue into a collage, to which he adds his own handwritten notes.

Nickas discusses the cathartic effect of his critique in an interview with Karen Rosenberg, published on Phaidon’s blog:

“That was a perfect example of doing something just for fun. I took an issue of Phillips’s catalog—I could have done Sotheby’s or Christie’s, but I did it because I could turn Phillips into the word ‘Phlips.’ There’s collage, writing, a lot of cutting through pages so you get this permeability like in Dieter Roth’s books. People said, ‘Now you’re making art.’ And I said to them, ‘This is as valid a form of criticism of the art market of our time as anything I could write.’ Someone like Jerry Saltz would sit and write a long piece criticizing auctions and the market, but no one does this. It was therapeutic, and fun. And it goes back to Phillips, many years ago, using things from Artforum.”

The booklet thus takes the form of a more visceral critique, as suggested by the ironic alternative title Nickas gives it on the inside front cover: “Art history. The last 10 minutes. Volume 1.” He revels in the freedom of his alterations, poking fun at the endless cycle through which private collectors buy and sell works from the same pool of overvalued pieces. Advertising slogans such as “Refresh your collection!” appear alongside exorbitant prices running into the tens of thousands, while auction-house claims such as “Certificate of authenticity obtained directly from the artist” are pasted over reproductions of the paintings. Elsewhere, Nickas exposes the shortcomings of art-world jargon: its clichés, its reckless overuse of adjectives, its inflated sense of importance, and its ostentatious practice of name-dropping.

Nickas’s détournement exposes the cracks in the art system. Yet beneath the satire lies a layer of what might be called “serious” playfulness. For this reason, Phlips recalls Mike Kelley’s carefully considered doodles in Reconstructed History, another work present in the Metabooks collection.