If you want to see something that's still somewhat erotically shocking, check out this video above, depicting naked young women smothering themselves in paint, pressing their bare torsos against a hanging canvas, and dragging each other around by outstretched arms across a canvas-covered floor. The tuxedo-clad maestro in the middle projecting this sensuously subversive bravado is French artist Yves Klein accompanied by an orchestra and an audience of prudently dressed women and men. Makes Damien Hirst seem almost modest.

Klein spent eight years (1954-1962), before dying of a heart attack at age 34, upending the artist's relationship to art and art's relationship to its audience. Before Warhol, Klein advocated the idea of the artist not as a machine but as a shaman capable of infusing space and objects with his aura. Artistic touch was not relevant; artistic conveyance was what Klein was after.

A judo black belt, Klein used female models as brushes; blanketed naked skin, sponges, and canvas with his patented International Klein Blue in the name of immaterial enlightenment; sold invisible paintings in an empty gallery; and asserted that the identical IKB monochrome paintings in his 1957 Picasso-tagging exhibition L'Epoca Blu (The Blue Period), were each priced differently. (According to Nan Rosenthal, while Klein told critics during and after the show that the prices were discordant, each painting in actuality was priced identically at 35,000 lire or about $56.)

A perpetual showman, Klein called his material oeuvre the "ashes of his art." Still, Klein likely would have been pleased with the results of last month's auctions in London. Two monochrome paintings nearly identical in size, identical in color and content, and painted a year apart, sold for different prices. IKB 94 (1959) (at right) fetched $2.9 million at Christie's, while IKB 170 (1960) garnered $2 million at Sotheby's. Turns out that even without his continued orchestration, Klein was onto something after all. There are plenty of reasons why artworks fetch the disparate prices they do, many of them (previous ownership, exposure, opinion, and salesmanship) having nothing to do with the physical work of art itself but rather the various auras that have attached themselves to it, beginning with the artist's.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

See Peter Beard's take on Klein style body painting here.