Epstein Emails Mention Paul Chan’s “Sade for Sade’s Sake,” Reviving Questions About Art, Power, and Misreading
A newly circulated tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails has pulled an unlikely artwork back into view: “Sade for Sade’s Sake,” a 2009 projection by American artist Paul Chan (b. 1973) that was shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In a January 31, 2010 message, an art adviser identified as “Annibelle” from Neilson Consultancy — likely the late British socialite Annibelle Neilson, who has been reported to have recruited girls for Epstein — urged him to look at Chan’s work while proposing artists who “could and have done some of the things you explained to me that you were looking to do on your island.”
The reference is jarring not because Chan’s piece courts scandal for its own sake, but because it is built as a critique of precisely the kind of pleasure-without-consequence that the email appears to normalize. The title is a pointed riff on “art for art’s sake,” suggesting how a life organized around private appetite can curdle into something predatory.
Chan’s work is a marathon projection — more than five hours — composed of shadow-puppet silhouettes that cycle through scenes of sex and violence drawn from the Marquis de Sade’s “The 120 Days of Sodom” (1785). The figures twitch and collide in a relentless loop, less erotic than spectral: an interminable theater of domination that reads as mechanical, joyless, and exhausting by design.
“The 120 Days of Sodom,” the product of an aristocrat’s fevered imagination, has long served as a cultural touchstone for thinking about cruelty as entertainment and transgression as a form of power. Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini famously reworked it into “Salò” (1975), a film widely regarded as one of cinema’s most disturbing attempts to anatomize the psychosexual logic of Italian Fascism.
Chan has described his own entry point as political rather than merely sensational. In an interview, he said he came to see de Sade’s story as inseparable from the economics of conflict: the four men who abduct and brutalize their victims can do so, he noted, because they are war profiteers operating within the war of Louis XIV. That framing, Chan explained, resonated in the 2000s amid the Second Gulf War, the destruction of countries in the Middle East, and contemporaneous accounts of profiteering.
Against that backdrop, the email’s invocation of “Sade for Sade’s Sake” lands as a kind of cultural short circuit: a work intended to expose the monstrousness of insulated desire appears to be treated as a mood board for it. The episode underscores a recurring tension in the art world, where difficult material can be read as critique, provocation, or permission depending on who is looking — and what they want from it.
The emails, as described in the reporting around their release, sketch a closed ecosystem of privilege in which other people register as accessories: obstacles to be managed, or props to be used. That atmosphere also echoes a broader argument increasingly made by psychologists and social critics about extreme wealth: that it can distort perception, narrowing empathy while expanding entitlement.
In a New York magazine story cited in the discussion around the emails, psychologist Paul Hokemeyer outlines a sequence in which wealth reshapes self-conception and then social reality: entitlement grows, isolation deepens through private institutions and private travel, and an echo chamber forms around the wealthy individual. The result, in this view, is not simply inequality as a moral problem, but inequality as a cognitive one — a condition that can make shared reality harder to sustain.
Chan’s “Sade for Sade’s Sake” was made in the shadow of war and in conversation with a literary tradition that treats cruelty as a diagnostic tool. Its reappearance in the Epstein correspondence is a reminder that artworks do not circulate in a vacuum. They move through networks of money, access, and interpretation — and sometimes, the most unsettling part is not what the work depicts, but how easily its warning can be inverted.
As more material from the Epstein archive is parsed, the art world is likely to face renewed scrutiny not only over who appears in the correspondence, but over how cultural objects are enlisted — misunderstood, instrumentalized, or stripped of their ethical charge — inside sealed worlds of power.
