Quotes of the Day

We dodge the taxi cabs hurtling down Charing Cross Road, hop over the thin, gray puddles and slip through the doors of London's National Portrait Gallery — a slow, steady stream of women shaking the rain from our umbrellas and asking, with just a hint of excitement, for directions to Room 41. Deep in the belly of the gallery, beyond the Lucian Freuds and the Cecil Beatons, Room 41 sits hushed and darkened. I join 11 visitors curled cross-legged on the floor, gazing at a 1-m-wide plasma screen where a shirtless blond man lies sleeping: David Beckham, of course. Who else would it be?

I settle into a corner and take a moment to get in the mood. David, Sam Taylor-Wood's 67-minute video of the slumbering football hero, was commissioned by the gallery and shot in a single take one afternoon in January as the soccer star enjoyed a post-training siesta in his Madrid hotel room. The monitor is positioned so that he is lying at eye level, and since the room is dark, we see only his head and his naked torso, light blue sheets covering his waist. It is amazingly intimate, as if, yes, you yourself are curled up in bed with Beckham. I think I can speak for all 12 of us in the room when I say that this is a mighty fine place to be.

Taylor-Wood is a leading figure in the Young British Artists' movement — the most promising young artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale, a Turner Prize nominee in 1998, and the youngest artist to be given a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London. Although the title of her Beckham portrait winks at Michelangelo's most famous sculpture, she says her inspiration was another of his sculptures, Night, a curiously muscular, semiclad woman carved in the 1520s for the crypt of Giuliano de' Medici in the Church of San Lorenzo, Florence. Gazing at David, one can't help but think of Andy Warhol's Sleep — the 1963 work in which he trained his 16-mm camera on the slumbering form of the poet John Giorno, coupled, perhaps, with the rich hues and dark settings of a Caravaggio. But never mind. You can dress it up any way you please, but David is nothing more than an hour's footage of a really handsome, really famous footballer fast asleep.

And that's enough for those of us in Room 41. Our thoughts are full of the beauty of Beckham, and the creamy blue light bathing his torso. His golden shoulder may nod to the classical statues of the gods, but we mortal women gaze, moonfaced, at the soft flicker of his eyelashes. He licks his lips and scrabbles at the crucifix around his neck, he moves his hand and the row of bands and bracelets around his wrist shuffle like waiting footmen — nothing happens, but we are bewitched.

What is it about this man, with his metrosexual style and his popstar wife and his oddly named sons, that holds our attention — not just in Room 41 but across Europe? Headlines speculate about his professional life — is he leaving Madrid for an English team? — and his even more speculative private life. Since the news broke of his alleged affair with personal assistant Rebecca Loos (and a procession of honey-limbed others), we've all been given license to consider what it must be like to sleep with Becks. Taylor-Wood's video merely takes it one step further. In the 17th century, privileged courtiers would take turns in the king's bed chamber, watching as his majesty slept. So too today: David gets to be an alternative British royal — so much more attractive and talented and lovable than the real ones, with none of the public-schooled, tight-voweled fustiness. And we get to watch him sleep.

No one lasts the full 67 minutes. They meander in, stay five minutes or 20, then meander out again, perhaps because they do not wish to seem foolish or infatuated enough to stick around for the best part of an afternoon. There are no gasps from the crowd as he rearranges his arms, no ripples of delight as a flickering smile drifts across his face. We sit before him in respectful, half-blushing silence. "They said it was like Michelangelo, and I think it is," says Anna Carin Hollstrum, a 51-year-old administrator from Sweden. She and her husband have lingered only a few minutes before heading back out into the light. "I think it is very beautiful." So do Lisa and Sasha, both 16 and from south London. They stand in Room 41 nudging each other and muffling their giggles. They don't come to museums very often, but the lure of Becks proved too hard to resist. "Well, he's fit, in' he?" observes Sasha. Does she think the portrait resembles the work of Michelangelo? She looks blank and shrugs. "I dunno," she replies, and her eyes drift back to the screen.

Days after David was launched upon an eager public, a portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh by Stuart Pearson Wright was also unveiled, showing Prince Philip bare-chested and old, with a bluebottle fly on one shoulder. He drew no blushing teens, no comparisons to courtiers or Michelangelo. The king is dead, we say. Long live the king.

• LAURA BARTON
• Why is Europe so obsessed with this man, asks Laura Barton