On Instagram, Jerry Saltz posted a fantastic gallery documenting his favorite works by artist Maurizio Cattelan:
Cattelan is both clever prankster and highly skilled artist. He made news at 2019’s Art Basel Miami Beach by duct taping a banana to a wall, calling it “Comedian” and selling it for 120,000 — it’s a perishable installation that Cattelan replicated at the fair, has reproduced since and can recreate so long as we have bananas and duct tape.
David Datuna, a performance artist born in Tbilisi, Georgia and living in New York, ripped the fruit off the wall and ate it, adding to the stir and swirl. Datuna titled his act “Hungry Artist” and nobody went to the police or a court over it as it in retrospect seems clear that the act of taping a banana to a wall and calling it art and the act of ripping it down for consumption was, especially if not plotted, an art historical moment of dialogue between living creators.
If you buy “Comedian, ” you know it’s a real banana, taped to a wall. If you cannot place it in a pristine environment, the elements will reach the invisible insects eggs on its skin and hatch them into feeding larvae that will dissolve the banana as they grow into fruit flies, leaving stinky goo behind.
Recently, Justin Sun, founder of a coin called “Tron,” paid $6 million for one of these bananas and promptly ate it. A crypto trade publication called Coindesk published a snarky editorial about it, Sun was offended, contacted the publication’s owners and had the editorial team fired. Nobody came out of this looking well.
Coindesk unpublished the editorial, but it is floating around out there. I didn’t find it essential reading. The art criticism part of it boiled down to the author not finding the humor or insight in “The Comedian,” and left me with the impression of somebody who doesn't understand readymade art at all. As I approach 50 years on Earth, I just can’t engage with people if I think their reaction to a Rothko will be “my seven year old nephew could do that…”
Then there’s the issue of Sun having $6 million to spend on a banana in the first place and we all have questions about what value, exactly, another crypto coin adds to the world that should justify such wealth in the hands of an individual. It’s very easy to dismiss crypto because, for a lot of us, it doesn’t touch our lives at all. At the same time, financial institutions now invest in Bitcoin, which has $3.4 trillion in market value and really does have advantages as a seamlessly traded currency that allows people to transfer wealth without traditional intermediaries. Occasionally, I write pieces for The Chicago Booth Review, where I help to make academic works more accessible to non-specialists (middlebrows, like me). This year, I learned that stable coins, which are like Bitcoin but pegged to the U.S. dollar, are very important for people who work to send money to support family overseas because the transactions can be instant, are not easily intercepted by sometimes corrupt governments, and don’t incur the heavy fees charged by companies like Western Union or traditional banks using wire transfers.
Sun’s Tron is the 10th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, valued at about $22 billion. It is designed to use blockchain ledgers as the basis of smart contracts, which lets app developers connect directly to users, without having to go through storefronts like those run by Apple, Google or other big companies. Again, I don’t use it, but I see the value and, for the moment, this is the kind of success that makes worries $6 million purchases possible.
Rich people in the art world are always troubling, as we scramble to the auction houses to see Magritte’s and Picasso’s before they fall into private hands, perhaps never to be displayed again in public. If Sun were better informed, he could have bought a more durable and displayable readymade on auction at Christie’s the same night he handed his millions to Sotheby’s.
I love Marcel Duchamp’s “In Defense of a Broken Arm,” where an ordinary shovel hangs, spirit-like, as if transported from the canvas of a Magritte and pulled into three dimensions. Had Sun purchased this, instead of Cattelan’s edible sculpture, I wonder if it would have drawn the same criticism. I do think he would have walked away with a better piece of art, with all respect to the man behind “The Comedian.”
By owning either, you are supporting a style of art that sought separate the meaning of creative works from the purely representing the human psyche. That’s what Duchamp and the Dadaists were trying to do — while surrealists delved into the subconscious, the Dadaists saw potential for art without a human element, something which the horrors of World War I made seem a very positive development. The abstract expressionists later pushed this idea further. But ready made art, from hanging shovels to mounted urinals and taped up bananas still advance the call of art in all things, an idea which shouldn’t be mocked out of hand.
Happy New Year, everybody.
Most art has way less potassium