IN DEFENSE OF BANANAS

“With a Historic Splash, David Hockney Becomes the World’s Priciest Living Artist”…$358 million for one painting : 2018

“Leonardo da Vinci Painting Sells for $450 million” (2017)

Two art auction headlines. 
They came and went and nobody batted an eye. 
People assumed that a da Vinci is worth $450 million because after all, he’s dead, and he’s in all the art history books. 
The David Hockney thing raised a few eyebrows because, after all,  he’s still alive.  

Think about those amounts of money. Nearly half a billion dollars — sales to individuals — not museums, not governments. In a world where individuals have billions of dollars to spend on ANY object, is monetary value meaningless?

 “It’s all hokum, sleight of hand, gas and mirrors!” That was Marcel Duchamp (1917) when he entered a urinal as art object at the Society of Independent Artists.  He justified his action with “it is art because I am an artist and I say it is” — the audacity of his “brutal sneer.” 

Almost everybody knows about the urinal but what was Duchamp trying to tell us? I believe it is that art is everything no matter what title you give it — painting, sculpture, egg turner, shovel. If we are to live our lives to the fullest, then we must look at everything we see and touch as “art.”

Well! That gets to be pretty exhausting, don’t you think? Much easier to establish categories. So shovels go into “house goods”. Buy those at the hardware store. Art belongs in museums…or in hands of very wealthy people. And that, dear readers, is totally against Duchamp’s lesson. 

Artists regularly remind us of Duchamp’s philosophy because we can’t seem to get it:  art permeates everything and belongs to everyone. Enter the banana taped to a wall (2019). Title: The Comedian. Artist: Maurizio Cattelan, the same conceptual artist who created the 18 carat gold toilet (Title: America). Mr. Cattelan is not very subtle in his “brutal sneers.”  

For a few minutes last week, everybody was talking about the $120,000 banana. Question: who is the comedian of the title? the artist? the art bureaucracy that willingly exhibited the piece in a major international show? the buyer? Or billionaires (and by extension, all of us) chasing validation and prestige through accumulation of things? 

Art isn’t alone in this skewed value system. In what universe is a baseball player’s employment worth $324 million (9 year contract?) How can anybody even talk about a $24,000 hair cut? Or a $300 million car collection?  How about a 27 story apartment for $1 billion (a part time residence)?  Or a $1.5 Million i phone? (Each of these is actual fact verified by a ten second Google search.)

We are immune to such outrageous extravagance. But tape a banana to a wall, and it’s a new kind of crazy. 

Or it's really, really funny.