Art Is on the Menu. Check, Please!

New York City’s nightlife is a playground for the affluent and irreverent—a place where the leather covers of the nightclub menus bend to accommodate any stretch of the imagination. In this world, if a bottle of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque isn’t enough to satisfy your taste for the lavish, the most exclusive lounges will pull out all the creative stops, then go one step further. So naturally Vocativ dove headfirst into this den of debauchery.

There, at a watering hole for the wealthy, we found sculptor Skye Ferrante disrobing Madame Rosebud.

Lower Manhattan’s The Raven club lists Ferrante’s art as made to order, right off the bottle service menu. Whether he is at the club, flanked by his rainbow-haired body guards, or he is in the quiet comfort of his studio, Ferrante sculpts his models nude, using one continuous piece of wire. “I am in my nude period,” he says. “It will last a while.”

“Everything about him is very unique and avant-garde, which is what New York thrives on,” says the club’s creative director Henry Stimler. Using only his hands and a pair of pliers, Ferrante makes impossibly tight bends, curves and loops in the 20-gauge dark-annealed steel wire to bring his nudes to life. “I’m moving from one catastrophe into the next…then out of it again,” says Ferrante. “It isn’t chess, it’s jazz.” Has he ever plucked or snapped the wire? He’ll never tell.

With your standard $3,895 bottle order in the Big Apple, you get a fancy sparkler in your bubbly and some unwanted friends in your section. But for $10,000, you get a naked model, a work of art and nine more of those sparklers spinning in the “Sparklerabra”—a Ferrante invention and an artwork in itself. Skye Ferrante begs us to ask the question: Are you buying the art or the attention?