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 naïve, Diana. I buy people all the time.''

There may be some Demi Moore naïveté 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.

Stunts designed to set art-world sensibilities aquiver are practically a rite of career passage. Who can forget the stir caused when a buffed-up Jeff Koons transformed sexual acrobatics with his wife at the time, the Italian porn actress Cicciolina, into a highly lucrative series of glass sculptures and photographs? Or when the godfather of transgression, Vito Acconci, in his legendary ''Seedbed, 1972,'' secreted himself naked beneath a ramp on the floor of the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, muttering obscenities as he . . . well, never mind.