Lot 560 R

“That gruesome photograph of Whitney Houston’s last supper, first posted on TMZ shortly after her death, stuck in the visual memory of the German photographer Thomas Demand. There were remains of room service delivered to her at the Beverly Hilton Hotel: a rolling table draped with a soiled tablecloth on which were a partially eaten hamburger and French fries, a Heinecken can, a Champagne glass and a small white vase with purple flowers. ‘I don’t have anything to say about Whitney Houston’, Mr. Demand explained in a telephone interview. Rather, it was the way the shot itself had the quality of a 17th century Dutch still life that intrigued him. ‘The proliferation of that kind of image at the time when she was not even in the coffin amazed me’, Mr. Demand said. ‘It amazed me that it would ever have been released.’ So he decided to recreate it. First he checked into the Beverly Hilton, in a room with the exact layout of Houston’s. Then he ordered the same food, he assumed from the news reports, that she had ordered. The shot could be seen as an intimate glimpse of the circumstances surrounding Houston’s death, but to Mr. Demand it was more than that. It was also an impersonal setting: a hotel room that could have been anywhere, a meal that could have been ordered by anyone.” (cited after: Carol Vogel, A Remade Tabloid Image of Houston’s Last Meal, in: The New York Times, 26. April 2012)