Tom Sachs Promised a Fun Cult

The sculptor likes to call his studio part of his art practice. Working there could often be scary.

- KATY SCHNEIDER AND ADRIANE QUINLAN

IN FEBRUARY, an anonymous “Art World Family” posted a job listing for an executive personal assistant on the New York Foundation for the Arts’ website. The listing sought someone who could “make life easier for the couple in every way possible.” This meant picking up clothes from “high-end stores,” managing “all medical need requests,” helping with “rooftop garden maintenance” and “in-studio cats,” and learning complicated-sounding “closet” and “dog systems.” It went viral, and the New York Times covered it (the paper’s summation: “The ad combined a tone so blithe with a detailed list of tasks so unreasonable”). A few days later, Artnet revealed that the couple was likely artist Tom Sachs and his wife, former Gagosian director Sarah Hoover. Of course it was Tom Sachs, thought anyone who had ever worked for him. Those “systems” were the tell.

Sachs, 56, has long been represented by Sperone Westwater, the Soho gallery that’s also home to Julian Schnabel and Bruce Nauman. He’s best known for installations made of consumer products: faux Knoll office furniture constructed from phone books, a McDonald’s value meal wrapped in Hermès paper. In recent years, much of his work has been related to space travel, like a life-size replica of the Apollo 11 lunar module made of steel and plywood. His sculptures tend to show the way they’ve been assembled with duct tape, screws, and handwritten notes (often done in permanent marker). These days, his pieces go for more than $300,000. At his opening at Acquavella in October, the line to get in wrapped around 79th Street. (It “resembled more of a Kiki’s waitlist than an Upper East Side gallery opening,” wrote