Art so unusual it has to be hidden from prying eyes?
In pictures of Steven A. Cohen’s just-listed $33.5 million triplex condo at 320 West 12th Street, it looks like all the artwork on the walls has been purposely blurred out (unless Cohen has a large collection of paintings of…pixels?).
Why is the art censored? We don’t know. The broker, Erin Boisson Aries at Christie’s International Real Estate, declined to comment.
But it wouldn’t be the first time Steve Cohen’s art collection has dominated listings photographs of his expensive property portfolio.
Last month, The Real Deal reported that Cohen had chopped the price on his penthouse at One Beacon Court to $45 million, a whopping $70 million less than its original listing price of $115 million. (It was originally listed in 2013, when Cohen’s hedge fund S.A.C Capital Advisors pled guilty to insider trading and was fined $1.8 billion.)
In a photograph of the penthouse’s master bedroom, we spied a large blurry Excedrin box. With a little sleuthing, we discovered the piece was “largeeexcedrinbox,” made in 2006 by the contemporary artist Tom Friedman, who took on the headache-inducing task of cutting 121 small Excedrin boxes into quarter inch pieces and reassembling them into one giant box, 54 inches tall and 27 inches wide. In this case, the sculpture wasn’t blurry because it had been purposely censored — it’s just intentionally…blurry.
When the apartment was first listed in 2013, Business Insider spotted another large sculpture in the listings photographs, then held by the Corcoran Group.
In the corner of the living room was a huge “bald man with raised arms.” He had a bulbous head, thinning white hair and a black-and-white striped shirt.
Who was he? Pablo Picasso, as it turned out. This seven-foot sculpture, made in 1998, was the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
Perhaps blurring out the artwork from the apartment at 320 West 12th Street might help it sell a little quicker than his penthouse, which has now been on the market for six years.
Cohen is well-known for his $1 billion art collection, which includes British artist Damien Hirst’s 1991 artwork “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” a tank containing a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde.
Cohen paid for the original shark, which was rotting, to be replaced by a new one.