Cattelan Keeps the Art World Talking. Is He Really "the Boy in The Emperor's New Clothes"?

Or perhaps people simply need him to play that part. But once he becomes a symbol of rebellion — Cattelan = rebellion = fashionable — hasn't the rebellion already ended?

To the art world, Maurizio Cattelan is a "wrecker."

Two years ago he cast a toilet out of 18-karat gold for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The gold toilet was called America. People queued outside the restroom door waiting to meet America. At one point the Guggenheim's artistic director even tried to hawk this piece of ironic household plumbing to US President Donald Trump.

Every appearance the Italian artist has made since he started making art in the 1980s has set off argument. A wax pope flattened by a meteorite. A drowned Pinocchio. Most recently, this past June, he staged a "pop-up cemetery" in Buenos Aires, inviting artists to hold funerals for the living.

Authority, religion, commodification, the art world itself — nothing seems off-limits to Cattelan's mockery. He has devoted followers who want him to keep rebelling. Others think his joking is only a pose.

A year ago, Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele invited Cattelan to put together an exhibition. On October 10, "The Artist Is Present" opened in Shanghai.

What does "copying" mean now? Across 17 rooms at the Yuz Museum, Cattelan and the artists he chose try to work through that question.

Appropriation is nothing new in art, and Cattelan is a master of it. The show's title and poster are lifted from a 2010 exhibition by performance artist Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"For many years the fashion industry has been fighting counterfeits in the market, while the art world, on the contrary, tends to treat 'appropriation' as a purely creative act," Cattelan said.

A famous Hollywood landmark — the nine letters H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D — has been painted across one wall of the museum. Cattelan added the roadside railing and the shrubs as well, everything in place for people to take selfies.

This is an age of checking in. Even at the real Hollywood sign, most people want nothing from the landmark but a photograph. So what separates the copy from the original? At the Yuz Museum he also reproduced the Sistine Chapel at full scale — doors, windows, frescoes, altar. Photography is banned in the real Sistine Chapel. In the fake one you can shoot all you like.

None of this is original either, of course. Cattelan pulled the same trick at the 2001 Venice Biennale, building another fake "Hollywood" set and flying in 150 VIP guests from around the world for an impromptu party called "Hollywood."

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Look only at Cattelan's early work and you would take him for a sly opportunist who spent most of his talent on titles.

He once shut his own studio and put up a notice in Italian, "Torno Subito" — the shopkeeper is out, back soon. In 1993 he did it again, renting the studio to an advertising agency that had just made a perfume commercial. This second act of truancy also became a Cattelan work, called Working Is a Bad Job.

Cattelan enjoys making a mess. For a 1996 show at the de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, he stole an entire exhibition's worth of another artist's work from a nearby gallery, made it his own, and gave it a new title: Another Fucking Readymade.

Nancy Spector, artistic director at the Guggenheim, reads the young Cattelan's "delinquency" as a young artist's trial and error, with his anxiety and his evasions inside it.

Before long, audiences began to find more in his work to recognize.

Charlie Don't Surf is a wax figure of a boy in a hood, sitting upright at a school desk with his back to the viewer. Only up close do you see that both his hands have been pierced through by two pencils driven into the desk, and that he is not studying anything. Cattelan has said the piece comes from the strained relations he had with teachers as a child.

The work that made his name is a stuffed squirrel that has shot itself. It slumps over its own kitchen table, one arm hanging down, a revolver at its feet. The piece is called Bidibidobidiboo — the spell that, once spoken, lets the fairy godmother transform Cinderella. For "squirrels" boxed into cramped kitchens, is suicide the only transformation left? Some have called the piece Cattelan's answer to a society that no longer lets anyone move between classes.

In the Shanghai galleries you can see a miniature model of this squirrel, displayed with models of Cattelan's other signature works in one particular room. The room is dressed as a souvenir shop, with postcards printed "Shanghai" and a Gucci Sylvie bow bag built out of Lego — all of them works by the artist. Perhaps you can find in it some link between copying and selling.

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In the late 1990s, having had a taste of success, Cattelan moved on to touchier subjects, making wax figures of famous men — the pope, Hitler, Kennedy — each with a full theatrical set to sharpen the conflict.

His Kennedy lies in a coffin. Compared with the former US president in his moment of triumph, or at the scene of the assassination, Cattelan explained, Kennedy in his coffin might be "more meaningful."

There is also Hitler (Him, 2000): from behind, a kneeling boy; from the front, Hitler's head. He is praying.

The most completely staged is La Nona Ora (1999), in which Pope John Paul II has been knocked to the ground by a falling meteorite. Cattelan asked the gallery to smash the glass in the ceiling and scatter the shards around the pope's body, so that visitors could reason out the whole event.

Cattelan likes to take up death in his work and lead people into imagining the cause. The Guggenheim once showed a drowned Pinocchio (Daddy, Daddy, 2016) — the puppet whose nose grows every time he lies, from the fairy tale by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi, made familiar worldwide by Disney. At the Guggenheim it floated head-down in the pool in the middle of the rotunda. Murder, suicide? Sick of lying — or is he simply the only one who gets caught at it? The questions can go on without end.

When La Nona Ora was shown in Warsaw, many Polish members of parliament who came to see it tried to lift the pope back onto his feet as a mark of respect. That response from the audience became a new part of the artwork.

It is getting harder to mark the moment a work of art is "finished," and harder still with conceptual art. In an email interview with QDaily, Cattelan said that the context a work is born into, and the moment people first notice it, both keep the work going: "It is always in progress."

Something similar happened in 2004, when Cattelan hung three extremely lifelike wax figures of boys from a tree. On the second day of the show a man climbed the tree and cut two of the ropes; before he could cut the third, he fell out of the tree. Lying on a stretcher, he told reporters he had done it "for those children."

Cattelan has also overplayed his hand. In 2002 he made two dummies dressed as New York policemen, Frank and Jamie, who can only stand propped head-down against a wall, their shoulder-to-shoulder shape unmistakably the Twin Towers brought down on 9/11. Some took it as Cattelan hinting that American supremacy stands on shaky ground; others attacked him for feeding off a disaster.

Authority, religion, the hypocrisy of the art world, America, the commodity economy — everything has been, or is about to become, a target of his ridicule. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, called him bluntly half saint, half bastard, a man who has thrown the critics into confusion: half of them his loyal followers, the other half furiously calling him an opportunist.

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In 1999, Cattelan and another artist, Jens Hoffmann, teamed up to manufacture a fake biennial.

The "Sixth Caribbean Biennial" was very convincing: they placed ads on various platforms, put out press releases in stages, signed up sponsoring institutions, a title sponsor and media partners, and released the list of participating artists bit by bit — a list with stars on it, among them Vanessa Beecroft, Mariko Mori and Olafur Eliasson.

The biennial ran for only six days, and its side events looked no different from any other biennial's: a comfortable resort hotel, a pool party full of art-world celebrities.

All of that is standard equipment for an art event. Beyond it, though, the "Sixth Caribbean Biennial" contained not one work of art. No painting, no installations, no photography, no sculpture, nothing. A biennial with the art taken out became a criticism of art carnivals in general — and this, of course, was another Cattelan performance.

At the turn of the century, with the biennial model at its height, Cattelan's joke was somewhat ahead of the curve. Writing in Frieze, the critic Jenny Liu attacked it: the performance was worth nothing except as a way for Cattelan to keep raising his own price, and his jeering was only a shallow gesture.

The Sixth Caribbean Biennial, for example, set out to mock the art fairs that march under the banner of "attention to local culture." The fake press release Cattelan had issued in advance said the biennial would go deep into the Caribbean and create chances for dialogue and connection between local communities and the international art world.

Jenny Liu was one of the visitors the press release fooled. "Unfortunately, I did not see a single artist from the local Caribbean here." The star artists sunning themselves on the beach showed no sign of wanting to deal with local art communities either. Were they really carrying out this performance piece together? Or were they just enjoying a free holiday?

Cattelan had, after all, tried something like it in 1995, when an art institution paid for a short trip to Miami. Artists normally use a residency like that to enter unfamiliar surroundings and find material for new work. Cattelan's Miami trip produced nothing physical; the trip itself became the work, titled Choose Your Destination, How to Get a Museum-Paid Vacation.

The artists who joined that "collective performance" in the Caribbean, delivering their mockery in person, will probably keep turning up at the same mediocre carnivals they were attacking — and Cattelan is no exception. This kind of mockery that stops short, Jenny Liu wrote, is nothing but cynicism.

At the Yuz Museum, the artist Philippe Parreno has filled the ceiling of one gallery with gold balloons, every one of them shaped like a speech bubble: his older work Speech Bubbles. On the floor below the balloons is a piece by Lawrence Weiner, black tape spelling out "Over and over, over and over, over and over..." (Over and Over, Over and Over, Over and Over...)

Put together, the two can describe two opposite conditions: an undiscouraged conversation that keeps going, or a meaningless chorus of agreement. The first is plural, the second single.

Cattelan explained what he takes "copying" to mean: "It is like blasphemy — it can be seen as an insult to God, but at the same time it is a solemn confirmation that He exists." So which kind is his mockery?

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There is no doubt that nearly every biennial and art fair wants Cattelan, a walking talk-generator. People believe he is the boy in The Emperor's New Clothes, the one who can always say what is true.

In 2011 the Guggenheim gave him a retrospective, All. Cattelan announced it as his farewell to the art world — a lie, naturally.

The pope, Pinocchio, the squirrel, a whole wall of "mini Cattelans" — his 128 works hung from ropes in the rotunda like an enormous wind chime. Some objected: a retrospective normally puts the classic works out honestly, one after another, which helps the audience understand them afresh, particularly since some pieces depend on the space they sit in. Cattelan was unimpressed. "Take it for whatever you like — a butcher's shop hung with Italian sausage, or a toy cabinet. Either is fine."

Cattelan rarely supplies his own reading, and most of the time he avoids interviews altogether. He was born in 1960 in Padua, in northeastern Italy; his mother was a washerwoman, his father a truck driver. Before he became an artist he worked through a long and varied list of jobs — cook, gardener, orderly, carpenter — and he also guarded corpses in a mortuary. Past that, few people know who Cattelan is.

Even in 2016, when the photographer Maura Axelrod made a documentary that reused the title of one of his early works, Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back, and interviewed gallerists, curators and magazine editors around the world, all that outside testimony still could not piece a Cattelan together.

"I can't answer who I am either," Cattelan replied by email.

Leave the maker aside: have the questions Cattelan stirred up been properly argued out?

His best-known recent work is that gold toilet. In 2016 he made it for the Guggenheim in New York, cast in 18-karat gold. Many called it conceptual art's next great moment, a century after Duchamp put a urinal in a museum (Fountain).

The difference is that Cattelan's toilet works. He passed over the Japanese makes that middle-class buyers now prefer and stayed with a classic lidless Kohler. This gold toilet, called America, was on view for more than a year, and the average wait was over an hour.

When Cattelan first raised the idea of a gold toilet with her, Nancy Spector has said, the first thing she thought of was Occupy Wall Street: 1 percent of people holding 99 percent of the wealth. Another reading is the emptiness of human desire, which comes down in the end to wanting a gold-plated toilet.

Then the gold toilet was pulled into a fight.

In September 2017 the White House asked the Guggenheim to lend President Trump a Van Gogh, Landscape with Snow (1888). Spector emailed the White House curatorial office to refuse, and suggested that Cattelan's gold toilet might be "more fitting." She spoke to the Washington Post: after all, this was a president who had once enjoyed showing off his money, who had displayed the gold-plated ceilings and elevator in his own mansion. The gold toilet was in keeping.

At that moment, America stopped being only Cattelan's work.

Nancy Spector has opposed Trump in public more than once, and the art world was split over this loud piece of sarcasm.

Jonathan Jones, a critic at The Guardian, praised it: as art has always meant to do, it had become an "excellent form" of resistance to those in power.

But is this not the art elite talking to itself? The gold toilet never did reach the White House, of course, and beyond the posture of mockery nobody wanted to look into why. Georgina Adam, a writer for The Art Newspaper, set Spector's reply to the White House beside one of Trump's tweets and found no essential difference in the arrogance of the two.

Through all of it, Cattelan the talk-generator stayed outside the argument. He gave only a phone interview to the Washington Post.

"He remains as elusive as ever: What is the meaning of life? Everything seems absurd, until the moment we die, when it finally means something. Then he politely hung up on the Post reporter."

(Except where credited otherwise, images are courtesy of Gucci. The cover image is a still from Be Right Back; the tall banner image is Untitled, a work Cattelan made in his own likeness.)