Many will be familiar with the recent sale of a banana taped to a wall at Sotheby’s New York. You may ask, what bang for your buck does $6.2 million get you in the contemporary art world? The shopping cart comprises a certificate of authenticity, duct tape, instructions by the artist describing how to display the work, and, of course, a banana. The whack of the auction hammer signified the purchase of an idea, whilst the artist, Maurizio Cattelan, owns the copyright.
The buyer, Chinese crypto investor Justin Sun, ate the banana shortly afterwards at a press conference in Hong Kong, wholly aware of the fungible nature of the fruit he consumed. Once eaten, he could replace it with another banana, and shock those who appraise value in the authentic physical product.
Sign up to the newsletter
The immediate reaction of many conservative critics is to use this sale and subsequent spectacle as an opportunity to decry conceptual art, including its assault on Beauty. But this time around, age-old debates pitting “art” against “non-art” are a waste of time. Serious treatment of the banana as art is counterproductive to the small “c” conservative cause.
It is important to understand the nuances behind this sale, in order to discover its true significance. Let’s peel back the layers.
Comedian (2019) by Maurizio Cattelan was first displayed at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. Since then, it had already been eaten twice before the stunt by Sun. Performance artist David Datuna removed the banana from the wall at Miami and ate it in front of a crowd in 2019, followed by an art student in a South Korean gallery in 2023. In response to the latter incident, Cattelan said it was “No problem at all”. His representative gallery, Perrotin, simply replaced the banana minutes afterwards.
The blasé reaction of Cattelan suggests the meagre value he attributes to its physical sanctity. Meaning is not necessarily rooted in the piece itself, but rather in how it is treated. Provenance is key. It matters who owned an artwork, where it was displayed, and any surrounding publicity. In this way, the value of the work is akin to a non-fungible token (NFT): conceptual, with the value in its historic blueprint.
Firstly, the initial display of Comedian at Art Basel Miami Beach matters. Some will point to the composition of the work and argue that a “five-year-old could have done that”. True, but the reality is that few five-year-olds could exhibit at Art Basel. Art fairs are ideal for creating drama because everything is a spectacle. Born from religious fairs in antiquity, the modern art fair is akin to a pilgrimage, where art aficionados and socialites coalesce. Networks form and develop. They are places in which to see and be seen. This is where Comedian gained notoriety.
Secondly, auction houses establish public benchmarks for the market value of art. Bendor Grosvenor makes this point excellently in his commentary about the sale. The work itself is part of a series of three, and so by selling one of them publicly – with the price transparent on the internet – the value of the other two editions in the series are set. Each edition can be situated in relation to the story purchased by Sun.
By drawing parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency, Sun inadvertently bolsters the conservative case for art based on aesthetic values because the stunt highlights contemporary nihilism in the physical product. Conceptual art is intellectually demanding, often for little gain, and ephemeral at most in post-Duchampian times. The recent retrospective of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy proved this. The initial room was dedicated to the conceptual period of his career. An Oak Tree (1973) began the exhibition: a glass of water atop a glass shelf, and text mounted on the wall below. Craig-Martin claims in the text: “I’ve changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.” The work itself questions at what point an object or material is transformed into a work of art. Once this question has been asked and the shock factor dissipates, nothing much is left to say.
Fortunately, Craig-Martin quickly moved onto wall-drawings and sculptures in the late 1970s. This shift was reflected in the exhibition’s quick progression to figurative works that possess immediately identifiable artistic value for aesthetic, cultural, political, and social reasons – particularly their illumination of the centrality of consumerism in modern life. If the exhibition had continued on a purely conceptual note, it would have quickly worn itself out. Reading text without image at an art gallery is laborious.
Sun clearly did not purchase Comedian for aesthetic purposes. He bought a story and cultural power, whilst also flexing the power of cryptocurrency, which he used to purchase the work. This highlights the importance of crypto investors as gatekeepers in the current art market, certainly not “woke” moralists. Owner of TRON, Sun is the biggest investor in Trump’s crypto project, World Liberty Financial. On 25 November 2024, he announced on X his $30 million investment, followed by the lines: “TRON is committed to making America great again and leading innovation. Let’s go!”. Aesthetic reasoning is moot.
The fool isn’t Sun but Sotheby’s for treating Comedian as a serious work of art. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”, Puck addresses the King in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Power in the art market lies with the crypto kings who hold the purse strings. Auction houses are losing their integrity as puppets to money. The catalogue note for Comedian describes it as a “masterpiece”. The Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, David Galperin, called it “profound and provocative”. The buyer described the piece as a “cultural phenomenon”.
Auction houses take a commission on each successful sale. Works of art do best at auction when they have a compelling narrative – a vital ingredient for provenance. The problem that Comedian poses for Sotheby’s is that its narrative is based on the critique of the art market itself. A difficult square to circle for Sotheby’s, who continued to push the narrative of artistic “genius” and “masterpiece”.
The actions of the auction houses are important because they account for 42% of the global art market, whilst Christie’s and Sotheby’s control nearly 60% of the total auction sales of art globally. Auction houses must stop reacting to tiring concepts by pushing them through the “genius” narrative. Failure to do so contributes to the denigration of the fine art industry, and it will be increasingly difficult to defend the art market as an industry distinct from, for example, financial services. Crypto investors will bolster their place as the new gatekeepers. Meanwhile, public arts institutions will fill their collections with more affordable didactic objects, produced by social justice activists and marketed for the public good.
Comments (0)
Only supporting or founding members can comment on our articles.