MoMA’s latest art piece is causing a buzz

What piece of art has generated the biggest buzz in the city?

 

Since its arrival this summer at the Museum of Modern Art, thousands of visitors have made a beeline for French sculptor Pierre Huyghe’s “Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt).” Not because it’s ­another nude, but because this one’s head is a beehive.

 

Curator Laura Hoptman says it’s the first living thing MoMA has put on display — though the Whitney has trotted out a parakeet — and a “notable” example of integrating art with nature.

 

It’s also the only artwork in the world that requires a beekeeper.

 

That would be Andrew Cote, a fourth-generation honey harvester who arrives at dusk and dawn to check on the health of the hive and trim it — carefully — into the shape of a head. At night, he covers it in a screened box to protect it from the chill and passing Pooh bears.

 

“These bees are as docile as wild creatures can be,” says Cote, who nevertheless dons a bodysuit and mask when he inspects the hive. (He also brandishes a smoker, whose sweet scent, of burning burlap, the bees find calming.) “If you get stung in the city, it’s probably a wasp or a hornet.”

 

MoMA bought the sculpture this year and in April shipped it to Cote’s farm in Connecticut, where he attached the hive and added the bees — a swarm of which, he says, he “rescued” in Brooklyn.

 

In June, he loaded the piece, hive and all, into his pickup truck and drove it to MoMA’s Sculpture Garden, where it was installed under a European weeping beech tree.

 

When the work was shown at Paris’ Pompidou Center, Hoptman says, staffers piled paving stones to keep viewers at bay. MoMA is more discreet: Here, there’s just an “enter at your own risk” sign at the entrance and a smaller sign by the work itself, telling you not to step on the planting beds. Hovering nearby are security guards like Ashley Rodriguez, who says no one has tried to get too close.

 

So far, the museum reports, there hasn’t been a single sting. Puns are something else. (“She’s bee-headed,” proposed Alan Klein, 62, of Brooklyn.)

 

Alas, seasons change, and with them go the bees. After Aug. 19, “Untilled” will be dismantled. Cote will keep the bees, but MoMA will freeze the hive and store it for future display.

 

For now, the bees are free to come and go — usually to any park in a three-mile radius. There they feast on a smorgasbord of pollens before making a beeline back to MoMA, where Cote has installed two other hives on the roof just in case this one didn’t work out. (He sells the honey he harvests at the Union Square Farmers Market.)

 

But not even he disturbs the bees, which may be why they’re content to linger there.

 

“They’re surrounded by [Henry] Moore, Matisse and Picasso,” Cote says, “so why would they go anywhere?”