Goldless.(The Talk of the Town)(Chris Burden)

The Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Chris Burden is known for topicality. During the Vietnam War, he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22-calibre rifle. After Watergate, he bought airtime on local TV and, he says, "became the first artist to make a full public financial disclosure" (net income: a thousand and fifty-four dollars). In keeping with the current economic mood, he recently started planning a show about weights and measures and the real value of things. For one of the pieces, he told his art dealer, Larry Gagosian, that he would need a hundred one-kilo bars of pure gold. The gallery looked into renting the gold--for two previous exhibitions of the piece, in museums, it had come on loan from banks--but in the end Gagosian decided to buy it, for around three million dollars, from Stanford Coins & Bullion, in Houston. The gallery wired the money in early February, and, for security reasons, requested that shipment be delayed until just before the opening. Two weeks later, R. Allen Stanford, the cricket-loving financier who owns the bullion company, was charged by the S.E.C. with an alleged eight-billion-dollar fraud, and all of Stanford's assets were placed in receivership by court order. There is no word yet on when or if Gagosian will get his gold.

The show, "One Ton One Kilo," was scheduled to open at the Beverly Hills branch of Gagosian on the first Saturday in March. That morning, there was a sign taped to the gallery's door: party cancelled, show indefinitely postponed. Burden was inside: a compact, thickset man in his early sixties, wearing a no-nonsense blue button-down, and looking a little stunned. He paced around the base of a 1964 Ford farm truck painted the color of grocery-store pumpkin pie, on which was mounted a crane holding a two-thousand-pound block of cast iron: "One Ton." (Burden lives in Topanga Canyon, and maintains a fleet that includes a fire truck, a forklift, a brush-chipper, and a bulldozer; the Ford was one of his own.) Even he, the master of the high-art gag, was having a hard time coming to terms with what had just happened. "This is such a simple trade," he said. "I have six goats and you have two gold coins. It's five thousand years ago, and I say, 'Can we make a deal?' It's the most traditional, conservative transaction. That it can go wrong is kind of shocking."

Burden climbed a short flight of ...