Photography by Derek Peck

Coke. Semen. Viscera. Shit. These are the greatest hits of subject matter (and materials) among New York’s so-called “downtown” scene of artists. Like a diamond-dusted bauble, Terence Koh has floated to the top of this sea of curious creatures. The artist has literally sold gold-plated nuggets of his own poop for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this was in the early days of his young career, with collectors at Art Basel fighting like agro moms over
     Cabbage Patch Dolls, circa 1984, to wrap their fingers around his scat. Now they’ll pay upwards of half a million for anything the artist has dipped in chocolate.
     Among the downtown kids, the radius of Koh’s circle is a bit wider than most. It includes child stars, art stars, their financiers, and those who write about them, and on given occasions in this milieu, the whole machine turns into a giant ferris wheel, where everyone’s on top eventually and there’s no more slowing down than there is speeding up, just a state of being akin to floating, a vantage best characterized as “high”.