Tekstværk af Maja Malou Lyse

On a sunny afternoon in May, Richard, a finance speculator on Wall Street and art collector, invites me to meet his Marilyn, who resides in a 33rd-floor penthouse condo on 5th Avenue, overlooking the Apple Store and the Plaza hotel. A nice place to meet if you enjoy the finer things in life, as he phrased it.


Marilyn, in this incarnation, is blue and green, with a twist of orange in the top right-hand corner. An original created by Andy Warhol in 1967, the portrait of Monroe is based on a publicity still of her from the film Niagara from 1953, a film-noir thriller released just one month prior to the Playboy magazine nude scandal. It portrays the Hollywood starlet at the height of her career, now frozen in time, with her distinctive black mole above her lip, later to be dubbed a beauty mark in her honor. She was facing the panorama window display in the main living room, overlooking the treetops of Central Park and what seemed like the whole city, if not the world.


Warhol’s 1962 silkscreen image of Marilyn Monroe, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, is the most expensive piece of 20th-century art ever sold: $195 million including auction fees, purchased by art mogul and gallerist Larry Gagosian in 2022. Tracing previous sales of Warhol’s Marilyn—$38.2 million in 2013, $17.3 million in 1998—shows that the insatiable hunger for relics of modern myth is thriving. “A Mona Lisa for the 21st Century,” was the tagline of Christie’s auction house press release and, indeed, it was: when Marilyn signed the contract for the Red Velvet nude shoot by Tom Kelley, she signed her name as “Mona Monroe” in the contract, to avoid association with the photos and in hope they wouldn’t haunt her later on in life.


Back in the 33rd-floor penthouse on 5th Avenue, Richard goes on to show me his first Warhol, another original silkscreen print of a small dollar sign. He tells me he bought it at an auction in Helsinki in 1993; a prominent art collector had gone bankrupt and was auctioning off his entire art collection due to the financial crisis during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he explains. I ask about Marilyn. He tells me he spent several years being the underbidder at multiple auctions every time a Marilyn would reappear on the market. In an attempt to ease his longing, he had, in the meantime, purchased two Marilyn prints which were still displayed in his kitchen. Then, in 2005, he finally acquired the real thing: the Marilyn I was currently face to face with.


“I have something for you,” Richard says, leaving Marilyn and me for a moment to ourselves. Before I can even spell out “commodity fetishism,” he returns with a small box. It’s a bottle of Chanel No.5 perfume. “This was Marilyn’s signature scent. Did you know?” Of course I know. Everyone knows. It’s one of those details that has passed from fact into fiction, from fiction into myth. “Thank you! I’ve actually been looking for a new scent.” I go on, telling him that I had worn the same perfume since I was 16, initially gifted by my father, and that I wanted to change fragrances now that I had reached my 30s. I open the bottle, spray my neck, then my wrists, and rub them together as I smell to inhale the scent. The perfume is dense, intoxicating the air, penetrating the room. I feel nauseous.


I never saw Marilyn nor Richard again, but every time I stood on 5th Avenue, on the square by the Plaza hotel, swamped by tourists and hotdog stands, I would look up at the skyscraper, at the window I estimated was Marilyn’s. I would wonder whether I perceived her as god-like, watching over the city, or as locked up and kept—and whether I envied her or pitied her either way. Admittedly, at times I did dream (dare I say yearn) of also being locked up in a fancy skyscraper, being someone’s highest asset and greatest possession, stripped of autonomy, all while gradually increasing in value as I aged.

Thank god Berardi writes that, “Those who glorify desire as if it was a good force did not get the point. Desire is not a force, moreover it is not positive at all, it can actually be cruel, evil, convoluted, self-harming, elusive and destructive.” So, I try not to judge myself too harshly.


I continue up 5th Avenue, through Central Park and toward the Guggenheim to see the Jenny Holzer retrospective. 

In 1982, Jenny Holzer installed a large LED billboard in Times Square that read “Protect me from what I want” in capital letters, reflecting on the slippery interplay of desire versus consequence. As I exit the Guggenheim gift shop, I see the slogan again, printed on caps in the gift shop: Protect me from what I want. I buy one: part joke, part prayer—my own personal dunce cap.

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