Donald and Melania Trump in 2005.
By Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic.
An online auction caught the eye of a particular corner of the Internet on Tuesday. RR Auction in Boston put up a piece of cake from Donald and Melania Trump’s wedding. It’s not a piece of the actual cake—a 200-pound Grand Marnier sponge deal that reportedly cost $50,000 and was not served to guests because the cake maker used too much wire to prop it up—but a fun-sized version passed out to guests during the reception. It came in a little monogrammed box.
This is not the first time a piece of cake from this wedding was auctioned off. In 2017, Julien’s Auctions out of Culver City, California, sold one for over two grand. This time around, however, artist Andres Serrano purchased the cake for $1,880. Serrano told Vanity Fair he and his wife, Irina, picked his winnings up in person last week.
The artist was coy when asked about his plans for the stale treat: “I’ve got something on my mind and it’s much more than cake!”
Serrano is probably best known for his 1987 Immersion (Piss Christ), a photograph of a crucifix partially submerged in what was reportedly his own urine. He was accused of blasphemy at the time, and has since spoken about how the entirely new take on the golden shower was widely misunderstood. “People wanted to interpret it according to their agenda,” Serrano said of the photograph to Art News in 2017. “It was seen as an attack on Christian values, on Christ, and it’s nothing further from the truth.”
His more recent work is still challenging, though it hasn’t caused the same degree of cultural uproar as it did in the 80s. In 2015, the artist showed a series that aestheticized known torture techniques, including scenes from Abu Ghraib. Trump, too, has sat for the artist. After September 11, 2001, Serrano began to photograph over 100 Americans, including everyone from Anna Nicole Smith to surviving firefighters. Serrano took Trump’s portrait in 2004, and it was shown in 2017 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York as a part of a sort of retrospective. The show also included pieces from the Torture series, and his 1992 work Objects of Desire, a series of firearm close-ups.
“You might say the Donald Trump [that] I photographed in 2004 was different than the man we saw in 2016, but then as now, he still represents America and the American Dream,” Serrano told Vice recently.
That said, what sort of commentary on the American Dream will this cake be in service of? Will he submerge the cake in urine as a play on marriage and power and dossiers and Russians? Serrano, ever the provocateur, says to stay tuned.
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This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
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