This year’s fair has its own mascot, of sorts: the donkey at the centre of Maurizio Cattelan’s installation Warning! Enter at your own risk. Do not touch, do not feed, no smoking, no photographs, no dogs, thank you. The work (P6), which comprises an empty room, a live donkey and a chandelier, has been re-created in tribute to Daniel Newburg Gallery, where it debuted in 1994. The piece was only up for one day before complaints from neighbours about the donkey's braying forced the show—and the gallery—to close.
Cattelan fondly recalls carting the original donkey from Connecticut to Manhattan: “I remember it was a Friday, back in May 1994, and we went up to Connecticut, with Daniel and his wife, to get a donkey. Daniel retrofitted an old Ford pickup truck with some wooden slabs that could function as a makeshift trailer. When we got back to the city, driving down Fifth Avenue, with the sunset lights on one side and luxury cars all around us, it felt like a triumphant entrance in the city of lights. Well, actually, I felt a little like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, fighting against windmills and setting myself up for a marvellous failure,” he says.
The new donkey has an equally poetic hinterland, having appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in productions of La Bohème and The Marriage of Figaro. As a performance pro, his voice will hopefully be more mellifluous.