You can almost imagine Salvador Dalí striding into the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) and clapping eyes on his much-lauded 1930s work, Aphrodisiac Telephone. The almost 100-year-old piece – a rotary phone and plastic lobster – is sitting casually in an office cabinet, on some decaying sponge, above a shelf of papers. It’s perched there precariously, waiting for someone to bang the metal door, or slip and push the entire cabinet over.
At least, that’s the scene in a picture, taken in February and sent to us by a visitor to the gallery, following on from the story we published about the JAG yesterday.
The set-up has the aesthetic appeal of a vehicle licencing department, or some other South African state bureaucracy. “Neeeeext”, a tired staff member mumbles, before picking up the crustacean receiver mid-task to have a personal conversation.

Dalí would have clocked this farcical sight and started to laugh. A maniacal laugh, his crazily tapered moustache twitching, eyes bulging. The surreal juxtaposition of his unimaginably valuable and rare work stuffed into a random cabinet pretty much encapsulates the entire spirit of the art movement he is synonymous with. It’s just damn surreal – at once, playful and menacing.
Except it’s not playful at all. That artwork, one of just six in the world, should be on display, taking pride of place at the JAG. Also, it should be protected and preserved like somebody’s first-born child. It is a cultural artefact of global importance.
The other five off-white lobsters are in Florida’s Salvador Dalí Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the US, the Centro Cultural de Belém in Portugal, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Netherlands, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in Edinburgh.
The four colour versions – arguably more famous – are treasures of institutions such as the Tate Modern in London.
Of its work, the Minneapolis Institute of Art says: “This classic Surrealist piece was among the most desirable 1930s original objects still obtainable when it was acquired with museum funds in 1996. Very few of these imaginatively transformed household items remain, though several have been issued as editions. Potentially functional, four versions with red lobsters have survived as well.”
The pieces were made by Dalí for British poet and major surrealist patron Edward James, and they’re made from real rotary phones.

Out of line
In 2018, when one of the six off-white lobsters was auctioned by Christie’s and sold to an overseas buyer, the UK government banned its export, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art gathered funding to buy it and keep it in the country. It paid £853,000 for the piece at the time.
That is roughly R19.5m today. But given that there has been a real uptick in zeal about surrealism in the six years since that purchase, you could expect “our” lobster to fetch infinitely more. If it’s intact, that is.
In 2023 leading English arts magazine Apollo said of the rising value of, and interest in, surrealism: “A new report released last month shows the number of Surrealist works selling for more than $1m has also jumped, from 38 in 2021 to 61 in 2022.”
The impressive auction prices for related artworks go hand in hand with several cracker exhibitions about the historical art period in Paris, Belgium and London – largely because it is also the centenary of the movement this year.
We’ve asked experts to give us a current valuation on the piece and when they get back to us, we’ll update this story. In the meantime, could someone please telephone the guys at the JAG, and ask them to take the lobster out of the filing cabinet?
Sign up to Currency’s weekly newsletters to receive your own bulletin of weekday news and weekend treats. Register here.