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The original room feels claustrophobic in its excess. The remix feels scary as if there's been an earthquake and another tremor is coming any minute.

"There's a sense of danger," says Waterston.

He seems cheerful and sweet, but don't be fooled: "My work absolutely has a perversity," he says. "There's always an underbelly to it."

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Shards of smashed Asian vases litter the floor of Waterston's Filthy Lucre. Amber Gray/Freer Sackler Gallery hide caption

itoggle caption Amber Gray/Freer Sackler Gallery

Shards of smashed Asian vases litter the floor of Waterston's Filthy Lucre.

Amber Gray/Freer Sackler Gallery

Here, Waterston says he wanted to show the volatility of beauty. The big, cancerous, gilded cysts he's blobbed onto Whistler's reproduced golden shelves, the spilled paint oozing onto the rug — these are his reactions to what's happening between art and money these days.

"This is what it means to be a living artist in this contemporary art world," Waterston says. "It is so filled with excess and this incredible consumption, this insatiable consumption of the object and of aesthetics."

The most vivid, even yuck-making example is what Waterston's done to Whistler's two golden peacocks; in this remix, the birds aren't just fighting, they're eviscerating each other.

They're "literally disemboweling each other," he describes. "One has the other's entrails being pulled out — talons are out."

The golden peacocks in Filthy Lucre are "literally disemboweling each other," Waterston says. Hutomo Wicaksono/Freer Sackler Gallery hide caption

itoggle caption Hutomo Wicaksono/Freer Sackler Gallery

They hate each other's guts! Which is exactly what happened between Whistler and Leyland. The patron asked the artist to just make some modest adjustments in his new dining room. Glazer says Whistler put a few wavy dabs of gold paint here, some metal color there, "and everyone was very happy with that."

Leyland and his family left London for the summer. And that, Glazer says, is when Whistler's imagination took flight. He transformed the room, covering every surface with blue and gold paint. He worked like a madman.

"Whistler talks about being up on the scaffolding at 6:00 in the morning and not coming down until 9:00 at night," says Glazer. "'I'm blind with sleep and blue peacock feathers,' he says."

He kept his friend and patron more or less informed about what he was doing: "All through the summer Leyland received letters from Whistler talking about the gorgeous surprise that Whistler was preparing for him and the family," Glazer explains.

Well, Leyland comes home, sees the extent of work — and the 2,000 pounds that Whistler wanted to be paid for it (about a quarter of a million dollars today) — and, as they used to say in Victorian days: Leyland blew a gasket.

In the middle of the dispute, with Leyland paying half of what Whistler requested, the artist went back to the dining room to finish up. "And that was really when he exacted his vengeance," says Glazer.

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James McNeill Whistler's mother — immortalized in his 1871 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother — worried about all the time and energy her son was pouring into the Peacock Room. "A gentleman's house isn't an exhibition," she told him. Detroit Institute of Arts via Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Detroit Institute of Arts via Getty Images

James McNeill Whistler's mother — immortalized in his 1871 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother — worried about all the time and energy her son was pouring into the Peacock Room. "A gentleman's house isn't an exhibition," she told him.

Detroit Institute of Arts via Getty Images

He painted those fighting peacocks — the just-plain-angry ones, not Waterston's gut-wrenching birds — and laid on even more blue paint. Then Whistler left, and never saw the Peacock Room again.

Now, we can't end this story without talking about Whistler's mother — that iconic profiled figure in gray and black. What did Mama Whistler think of the whole thing — the frenzied work, the manic effort? Glazer reports that Anna Whistler was worried about her son; she thought he was working too hard, not eating, not sleeping:

"She chides him about that and says, 'You know, Jimmy, a gentleman's house isn't an exhibition' — meaning: Get out there and make some money and make some things that are going to sell," says Glazer. "And so, always listening to his mother — Whistler was kind of a Momma's boy — he did invite the press in to watch him work in the Peacock Room."

Yet another thing he forgot to tell Frederick Leyland!

The results of this delicious dispute can be seen on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., — at the Freer, site of the original Peacock Room, and the Sackler, where Filthy Lucre, Darren Waterston's remix, is on display until January 2017.