y first thought was, If I'm going to have to sell it, I might as well sell it,'' the artist Andrea Fraser said last week, speaking from a downtown studio. Fraser was referring in a starkly literal sense to her work's medium: a fit 38-year-old brunette in a sexy red V-necked dress, who is in fact herself.

Fraser's videotape ''Untitled'' (2003) was scheduled to go on view at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea on June 10. In it, the artist is seen having sex in what some have characterized coyly as ''every imaginable position,'' with an unidentified American collector who paid close to $20,000 to participate in this curious 60-minute work of art.

As ''Untitled'' begins, Fraser enters a hotel room, her hair swept fetchingly to one side. The setting is standard-issue Hip Hotel: the videotape was filmed, using a single overhead camera, in a room Fraser identified as being at the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan, owned by Ian Schrager. The artist is carrying two glasses, white wine in her left hand and what looks like a highball in her right. The collector enters, and then begins a filmed seduction whose detailed contractual terms were worked out in advance by the artist's gallery. Among the requirements for participation in ''Untitled'' were that the artist's potential collaborator be heterosexual, unmarried and, of course, willing to underwrite the transaction. ''All of my work is about what we want from art, what collectors want, what artists want from collectors, what museum audiences want,'' Fraser explained. ''By that, I mean what we want not only economically, but in more personal, psychological and affective terms.''

It would be easy to conclude that Fraser's intellectual apparatus might have cooled the ardor of the most passionate suitor. That it did not may say less about Fraser's persuasiveness than about the seductive spell that contemporary art-making seems to cast.

For Fraser, ''Untitled'' was, she explained, ''not a literalization of what is, in fact, a very old metaphor, that selling art is prostitution,'' a point that was made with pithy precision by Baudelaire. ''This is not 'Indecent Proposal,''' Fraser added quickly. And it is not -- or not quite.

In Adrian Lyne's notorious (and highly successful) stinker about a billionaire (Robert Redford) who pays for a night with someone else's wife (Demi Moore), Moore says to Redford, ''You can't buy people.'' He replies: ''That's a bit naive, Diana. I buy people all the time.''

There may be some Demi Moore naivete operating in Fraser's work, peering from behind the verbiage of a brand of thinking known as ''institutional critique.'' ''Andrea's work has been about exposing the mechanism of the whole art system,'' explained Dan Cameron, senior curator at the New Museum. ''In this case, she's playing a little bit with what the act really is that takes place between an artist and a collector. It underscores the paradox of ownership and pushes it into a realm that hasn't been so pointed before.'' That may be. But when Fraser remarked that she wanted the transaction underpinning ''Untitled'' to be ''normal to the extent that it could be,'' she was perhaps forgetting that, in any number of ways, it already is. Article 230 of the New York State penal code refers, quite straightforwardly, to the sort of exchange ''Untitled'' immortalizes as prostitution. It is safe to assume that transactions just like it are taking place this very minute in hotel rooms around the world. But those enterprises, unlike Fraser's, lack the frisson of what the art press tends reflexively to call ''transgressive.''

Far from being the first artist to use her body as a medium for producing art or polemics, Fraser is one in a long -- if not in every case distinguished -- line of provocateurs. Back in the 1970's, Carolee Schneemann pulled a paper scroll out of her vagina at a performance, and Hannah Wilke adorned her body with sculptural multiples of vulvas cast in hardened chewing gum. A decade later, the performance artist Karen Finley smeared her naked torso with chocolate syrup and publicly performed acts -- using a yam -- that are not advisable to mention in these pages. For many years, Annie Sprinkle, a sex worker turned artist, gave performances at which she invited members of the audience to examine her cervix through a speculum.

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