It was the phone call that every young artist longs for, the call that could mean fame and fortune. Or at least a career in art rather than one manning the frothing machine in Starbucks. "Saatchi wants to talk to you," was the message.
"I thought, 'My God, this is a call I must answer'," said the Italian sculptor Eleonora Aguiari, a 35-year-old MA student at the Royal College of Art in London.
She did, and was told that Saatchi was interested in her work. She fixed an appointment, duly turned up and started discussing ideas for installations and sculptures.
But it was a case of mistaken identity. Ms Aguiari was, in fact, meeting Michael Moszynski of the advertising agency M&C Saatchi, run by the famous art collector's brother.
Mr Moszynski had seen a work from her degree show: a 19th-century equestrian sculpture of Lord Napier in Queen's Gate in Kensington, which she had wrapped in red tape.
"They thought that my idea could be used for a Tory advertising campaign," said Ms Aguiari. "I said, 'No: my work is for sale but my ideas are not'. I was very disappointed. This was not at all elegant. They wanted me to wrap an ambulance up in red tape."
An ambulance wrapped in red tape? Not a bad idea for an advertising campaign.
"I didn't know before I started the work that red tape in Britain also means something about bureaucracy," said Ms Aguiari.
Mr Moszynski said: "Shortly before we saw a photograph of Ms Aguiari's work we had been thinking about wrapping an object. We genuinely had the same idea, and I didn't want her to think that we were taking her idea and ripping it off.
"When we saw the picture we thought it would be great to commission an artist to wrap an object of some sort. However, when we saw Ms Aguiari she pointed out that she wasn't a commercial artist, she was an artiste - which we completely understood. In theory, we would like her to wrap something for a client. We may or may not give her a brief and she may or may not take it."
It would not be the first time that advertising agencies have taken inspiration from art. A Volkswagen advert bore a similarity to Gillian Wearing's Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say. A recent Honda ad was reminiscent of Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go), a piece by the Zurich duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The famous slashed fabric of the Silk Cut campaigns hark back to the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana.