This is Billy Apple’s last painting. Since then he has turned to ashes. It is also my last Apple, and let me tell you that leaves a taste in the mouth. Dust to Dust. It wasn’t the plan. My Last Apple? What I mean is the words ‘Apple turns to gold’ are my doing, a re-purposing of my title for his show at the Auckland Coin & Bullion Exchange, Parnell, which lasted five days, from the 5th to the 10th of September, 1983. Nigh on forty years ago now. The typography is Billy’s adaptation of his A4 announcement flyer for the show. To my knowledge Apple Turns To Gold was the first and last art exhibition to take place at the Exchange. There was only one work on display: The Golden Apple, a 25c apple cast in 103.599 ounces of pure 24k gold. The idea for the show was his, an enlightening restatement of his best and perhaps his only idea. At the time he said that ‘with this work the substance of art and monetary value are one and the same. My name and the name of this object are, also, one and the same.’ So, the artist meant he is golden now. He has taken the words right out of my mouth and turned to gold! Words to conjure transubstantiation—I mean literally not liturgically.

Apple Turns To Gold was painted to make some dosh at auction for Artspace. Of course, Apple had exhibited at Artspace from its beginning, but there was one show in particular which motivated his making of the work: Tales of Gold: The Tale of Ray. An Installation by Billy Apple with Wystan Curnow, 16th June to 3rd July, 2004. It seemed closest to Artspace’s raison d’etre. That show also featured The Golden Apple, which had originally been sold for a price of $85,000, hence the heavy security — the uniformed guard — so out of place at Artspace. Auckland Coin & Bullion was not your normal art dealer, it was beholden to the bullion not the art market. No more was Artspace your normal public gallery, it was beholden to experimentation and critique, the art knowledge ‘market’. 


The difference between these spaces could hardly have been more stark, the one devoted to the private the other to the common good. The one says, Apple has tried the art market and now for some reason, maybe because the prices are higher there, he’s turning to the gold market. The other says, well, look, didn’t you see, the words pasted on the ceiling panels extracted from a book entitled Where’s the Gold? My Story (1994), by one Ray Smith, the former owner of the Auckland Coin & Bullion Exchange, in which he boasts about his lost wealth and whines about his imprisonment for defrauding his investors. Also in a small publication, I detailed his shady dealings with the moulds of The Golden Apple. Knowing that the abnegation of my own intellectual property rights is inherent in Apple’s work was no help to me, I was as mad as Billy was with Ray Smith, we’d been had.

Having agreed to lend The Golden Apple for The Tale of Ray, and most recently for Apple’s 2015 retrospective at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, its owner declined requests from the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1999), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2009), the Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna (2012). Then in 2020 a request from MTG Hawkes Bay was met with an admission that ‘the Apple,’ as it was described, had been melted down, turned into gold and sold. Apple has been turned (back) to gold and gold to cash. At today’s prices it would have netted its owner over $260,000. He has claimed (counterfactually) that ’it had never been considered as an art object of value and more than its gold content’ and that as an apple had been…’ more of a Liability rather than an Asset. What a sorry experiment in the comprehension and commensurability of value and worth, of as a private and a public good. With Apple Turns To Gold it has another chance.