US President Donald Trump has had the cake from his wedding to Melania in 2005 sell at auction for nearly $2,000, but he may be concerned about what could happen to the dessert.
Artist and photographer Andres Serrano is probably best known for his "Piss Christ" photograph, where a model of Jesus dying on the cross caused massive controversy among Catholics, but he has just shelled out a considerable sum to purchase the cake served at Donald Trump's wedding to Melania at their 2005 wedding.
Trump's original wedding cake - a 200-pound yellow sponge cake - would have cost around $50,000 to buy (according to the auction house that sold this cake), but miniature versions of the cake were served to Rudy Giuliani, Heidi Klum, P. Diddy, Shaquille O'Neal, Simon Cowell and other guests at the wedding.
This isn't the first piece of cake from that wedding to be sold - back in 2017, Julien’s Auctions got over $2,000 for the cake, but this cake sold for only $1,880. Serrano was delighted to win, however, travelling to collect his winnings in person, but he admitted to Vanity Fair he has greater designs for this cake than a simple dessert.
"I’ve got something on my mind and it’s much more than cake!" he coyly revealed to reporters. "Artists work in mysterious ways. You never know what they're up to!"
Andres Serrano has actually worked with Donald Trump in the past - photographing the former host of Celebrity Apprentice after the tragedy of 9/11 - hoping to portray a "panorama of American society". Despite all of this, when asked in a 2017 interview about the 45th President of the United States, Serrano refused to badmouth Trump. "I never speak ill of people who’ve posed for me," he stated.
"I took Donald Trump’s portrait for my America series, started shortly after September 11th. I felt we had been attacked as the ‘enemy’ and I wanted to show who America is... You might say the Donald Trump I photographed in 2004 was different than the man we saw in 2016, but then as now, he still represents America and the American Dream.”
Until the 68-year-old reveals his plans with his newly-acquired cake, Andres Serrano's most famous work remains the Piss Christ painting.
Created in 1987, Serrano photographed a crucifix dunked in a tank of his own bodily fluids, but despite plenty of backlash and criticism from sections of the Christian community, he told the Guardian that there was no political statement behind his work.
"At the time I made Piss Christ, I wasn't trying to get anything across. In hindsight, I'd say Piss Christ is a reflection of my work, not only as an artist, but as a Christian."
Anger toward the painting reached a head in 2011, when angry French Catholic fundamentalists attacked the photograph with hammers. But Serrano says that the reaction to the painting says more about the individual than it does himself.
"The thing about the crucifix itself is that we treat it almost like a fashion accessory. When you see it, you're not horrified by it at all, but what it represents is the crucifixion of a man. And for Christ to have been crucified and laid on the cross for three days where he not only bled to death, he s**t himself and he peed himself to death."
"So if Piss Christ upsets you, maybe it's a good thing to think about what happened on the cross," Serrano added.
