“Homes are not museum settings,” says Candace Worth, a New York–based art adviser, who tells of a plaster sculpture that recently fell off her client’s wall and shattered into pieces that were then swept up and disposed of by the maid. “In a gallery, walls are reinforced. Of course, there is a caliber of collectors who do now have homes like museums, but most of us don’t.”
Worth recently endured her own small tragedy when a worker in her house, eyeing a cardboard box he wanted to use and finding it empty save for what seemed to him a bit of rubbish, tossed out what was really her latest acquisition: a John Bock floor sculpture made of eggshells in a sewn felt sack. It broke like, well, eggshells. “It was a really beautiful, poetic small piece,” she says. “I was hysterical.”
“Everyone has that my-housekeeper-used-Pledge-on-my-Donald-Judd story,” says Amy Cappellazzo, international cohead of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. “People just don’t want to talk about them because they’re worried about affecting the value of their art.” Indeed, the issue of household staff overzealously cleaning fragile works is so common that the insurance corporation Chubb publishes a 10 Things You and Your Housekeeping Staff Should Know pamphlet in English and Spanish to distribute to its fine art customers. (An excerpt: “A piece of masking tape pressed to the floor to gather even the smallest fragments of that Tang dynasty horse might be the difference between a completely successful restoration and a disappointing one.”) Unfortunately, no one handed a copy to one contemporary art dealer’s cleaning lady before she reportedly put a Robert Gober stack of newspapers out with the recyclables. Artist Kiki Smith’s housekeeper also did not get the memo: “She knocked the head off a sculpture that a friend of mine made the first day she came to me. It was embarrassing to call up my friend and tell her—it wasn’t exactly fixable. Fortunately she was very gracious and made me a new one.”
