On returning home to Berlin from Hamburg, where I had seen Andrea Fraser’s midcareer retrospective, I was besieged with questions about the artist’s new “sex work,” a videotaped performance for which she was “commissioned” to have sex with a collector. “Did you like it?” I was repeatedly asked, and I found, even to my own surprise, that I had to answer yes, I liked it very much. This work, called Untitled, is clearly in keeping with a risk-laden artistic investigation that began in 2001 with two pieces: Kunst muss hängen (Art Must Hang), Fraser’s re-creation of an impromptu 1995 speech by Martin

Zdenek Felix had long since presented Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger at the Deichtorhallen. To close his directorship, Felix invited Werner Büttner to mount a comprehensive retrospective and complete this “Friends’ Trilogy” in Hamburg. No art-school product, Büttner came to painting at Oehlen’s suggestion. Or better, he was provoked into painting, a medium that did not enjoy high standing in their eyes, being too burdened with ideas like sublimity and truth. But painting, as we well know, can also be summoned onto the canvas by destructive desires and the revaluing of values. Büttner’s