Yesterday on artnet ace market reporter Katya Kazakina noted the mighty fall of Dan Colen’s 2004-06 painting, Holy Shit, a 4×3-ft plywood board with the words HOLY SHIT painted on it, and turned upside down. It was the last lot in Christie’s modern/contemporary sale Monday, where it sold for $12,700, a 96% drop from its last public sale, when it opened Sotheby’s evening sale on November 13, 2013. As befits its title, Holy Shit has passed through the art world’s dual systems of veneration and digestion. Now is the fleeting, interstitial moment to stare at it, try to think back to what we ate and think forward to what it means.
First off, I was shocked at the paucity of provenance, exhibition, and publication information in the auction listings, which doesn’t begin to capture the way Holy Shit was spread around the art world. The November 2013 listing says basically nothing: one collector bought it from Peres Projects. That’s it. And it still sold for $341,000. When the work reappeared at Sotheby’s in 2023—where it failed to sell for $40-60,000—it’s now reported to have been in four collections, and the 2013 buyer was not, it seems, the 2023 seller. And Holy Shit had been exhibited—and published in the catalogue—in a 2011 Dan Colen show in Oslo at the Astrup Fearnley Museum. Why was this not mentioned in 2013? Only in 2025, though, does Christie’s mention Holy Shit being included in a May 2014 show of Peter Brant’s Colens. Which means Brant got into Holy Shit at the top, in the six-month window after the Sotheby’s sale. And while several hundred thousand dollars is not much to a billionaire, and it’s tiny even relative to the number of Colens he has, it’s comforting to realize that almost all the losses on Holy Shit were taken by Peter Brant.
Comforting until you also realize Brant was not the only one with Holy Shit on his hands. The Astrup Fearnley installation included at least four Holy Shits, and one is flipped. And granted, it’s 240 pages, so maybe Brant’s is in there, too, but the only one I’ve seen in the catalogue so far is actually the flipped one, Holy Shit (Mirror), 2006. Which belongs to Dakis Joannou, and which he included in Skin Fruit [pdf], his 2010 collection show at the New Museum. [UPDATE: I’ve reached out to Oslo for details.]
Holy Shit was also in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. At least one of them was. How could this not be mentioned? Because it wasn’t Brant’s painting. James Wagner’s Biennial photo shows a different object, the third one in the Oslo install, while Brant’s is in the middle. [The one on the left has Yo and other stuff written on it. Not this, either.] [UPDATE: According to the Biennial’s exhibited works list, this Holy Shit was one of several signs that comprised, Untitled, 2005-06, an “Installation of paintings. Plywood, molding paste, spray paint, and oil paint, Dimensions variable. Collection of the artist.”][TWO WEEKS LATER UPDATE: now the owner of the Holy Shit from the Whitney, who got the work from the artist, has shared a picture—and it’s also the 2005 YO XXX one from the Oslo installation, which got tagged by visitors at the Whitney. I so want to be alive when the editor of Colen’s catalogue raisonné curses my blog for the Holy Shit it’s been stirring up.]
Actually, while that looks like the Holy Shit Sotheby’s sold in 2013,
it very much is not the one Brant showed in 2014, flopped on in 2023, and dumped in 2025. In Greenwich in 2014, Brant said his Holy Shit was from 2003. But the one at Sotheby’s in 2013 was signed, “2006.” And the one at Sotheby’s in 2023 and Christie’s in 2025—Brant’s—was signed, “2004-2006.” Christie’s has a photo of the beautifully beveled and joined verso, with the date signed on top of it, and a Peres Projects sticker [“2004-2006”, “enamel and wood”] and stamp. So unless he has two, Brant’s 2014 Greenwich date seems to wrong. [update after seeing the Oslo checklist: I am legit confused; Oslo’s 2003 enamel painting does look like Greenwich’s 2003 painting. AND it looks like the front of Brant’s 2023/2025 painting, except the date is different, and of course, the back reveals it is no random sheet of plywood.]
But why could it even matter? In 2012, Life+Times, a website produced by Shawn Carter Enterprises, which I guess counted as Jay-Z’s blog, staged “Dan Colen: A Retrospective”, a slideshow captioned with comments from the artist [Colen]:
I consider this painting to be my most inspired artistic moment, and not because of what the text says. Early on, before I had been given very many opportunities to show my work, I was invited along with a group of my close friends to take part in a show in Paris. I had no work at the time but didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to travel with my friends, so I wrapped this piece of plywood in a bed sheet and pretended that it was a finished painting. When I got to Paris, I asked for the art dealer’s credit card so that I could go buy some mounting hardware at the hardware store. I bought a can of red spray paint instead. I dragged the painting into the courtyard and, without thinking, wrote ‘Holy Shit.’ I took it into the gallery and hung it upside down. It’s important to note that prior to this gesture, all I had presented as an artist were four hyper-realistic paintings that I painted obsessively for two years. Although the story and the idea behind making the painting are pretty stupid, it remains one of my favorite paintings that I have ever made. I actually ended up making three nearly exact copies of it with oil paint.
So there are three? Or three copies and one original? Or three copies, one original, and one mirror? According to Colen’s CV [pdf], this Paris show was at agnès b.’s Galerie du Jour, in 2003. The picture used in 2012 appears to be what would eventually become Brant’s Holy Shit. The one with the sexy back, which, I’m sorry, does not look like a scrap of wood smuggled in a blanket, and which, anyway, is dated 2004-06.
[This November 13, 2013 Sotheby’s evening sale is turning into a truly Holy Shit moment in art world history. It’s when Tobias Meyer sold that double disaster Warhol, and one of racist dirtbag Eric Clapton’s giant Richters for world records. When a Twombly I’ve had in my tabs since March was the only one of the eight [!] that didn’t sell. And when Malaysian crook Jho Low bought the Round Jackie he gave to Swizz Beatz.]
But what felt like incomplete auction listings and far-flung exhibition histories turns out to be multiple works designed to seem identical, but with different materials and histories. Colen’s original Holy Shit is on brand for the willful garbagemaking of that Colen/McGinley/Snow moment, the painting equivalent of a piss-soaked field of shredded phone books, While the exact copies feel very much like the extravagant production of aggressive banality he grew into.
The Holy Shit Sotheby’s sold in 2013 looks like the Holy Shit in the Whitney, but isn’t the one in Paris; and if Peter Brant bought it in 2013-14, it’s not the one he showed in 2014, or sold in 2025. If these differences mattered at all, it might have showed up in any way in the attention paid to these works over the years. It turns out it might take more than one flush to get rid of them all.