Over at Intellectual Takeout, John Horvat talks about bananas on walls:
My reasoning centers on a recent event in New York City in which the renowned Sotheby’s auction house sold a 2019 art piece dubbed “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan. The work consisted of a fresh banana duct-taped to the wall.
The bidding started at $800,000, and within five minutes, the item sold for $5.2 million plus auction house fees, which came to a total of $6.2 million. The new owner is Chinese-born crypto-businessman Justin Sun.
The actual banana cost thirty-five cents when bought in the morning at an Upper East Side fruit stand. The new owner will get a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions should he want to replace the banana before it rots. Mr. Sun has already announced that he will eat the original banana “as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”
Commenting after the sale, Billy Cox, a Miami art dealer with his own copy of “Comedian,” says the work is something of historical importance that comes only “once or twice a century.”
Uh huh. Like the paint-splattered “art” of Jackson Pollock, to describe this as “art” at all, let alone something of “historical importance”, is to underline the folly of the so-called cultural elites and their absurd mania for post-modernist deconstructivism.
We are living in a society where certain liberal sectors inhabit an alternative reality where thirty-five-cent bananas are handled as multimillion-dollar works of art. The problem is that they want to force everyone else in society to believe their madness.
“Pull the other one” would be the obvious rejoinder. But Horvat takes it further:
The first are those who do not want to see the absurdity of the banana on the wall and dogmatize that it is art. They create their own reality and impose it on the nation.
The second group consists of those tired of being told a banana taped to the wall is art. They long to live in a world where art is art and bananas are bananas.
In the [2024] election, some of the latter group said, “Enough is enough.”
This reaction was not against a single banana on one wall.
You see, there is [also] the banana that claims a man is a woman and a woman is a man. Other bananas claim that people can choose their pronouns, pornography in libraries is literature, or that it is just fine for men to compete with women in sports. We are told drag queen story hours are suitable for children, after-school Satan Clubs are educational and it is not a human baby but a clump of cells.
It is all part of a vast banana extravaganza that we are asked to admire and make believe is the blueprint for a dream society.
Quite right. There’s only one thing to do when faced with these bananas:
yup. Dip them in boiling oil.
SOMEBODY’s on their way to the bank with a check, laughing their ass off.
Hunter Biden. Money laundering.
bingo
walking through certain museums, I’ve made the remark, “that’s not art. It’s a waste of time, effort and materials.” I might have said that far too loudly a few times
TheRandomTexan said it, and it’s a variation on “write a book” and then “sell” it. In both cases, it’s laundering a bribe paid to a politician, as a quid pro quo.
I enjoy/appreciate a lot of modern art, but like all things new in art – most of it is crap. 100 years from now it will have settled out and the crap will be more or less gone with the worthwhile art still appreciated.
More specifically related to installation art and concept art generally – it is showmanship and trendy bullshit almost without exception. A triumph of marketing if you will. Look back at the 50s and 60s where the minimalist and concept art kind of took off. No one who isn’t already vested in that movement cares about it, in another 50 years it will be dead. Meanwhile, the Expressionist from the 20s-40s are quite mainstream. Not all art movements have equal value and many are dead ends.
Here’s my financial tip of the day for Justin Sun: Yesterday I bought a 6 pack of Comedians at IGA for the sum of 58 cents a pound.
However, they are still green so eating them right away is not an option unless a side order of hershey squirts is acceptable.
Modern “art” is little more than a celebration of the profane, blasphemous, ugly, or just plain stupid. This person who bought this reminds me of the old adage “a fool and his money are soon parted”.
I might have said this here before, in which case, I apologize. Charles M. Russell, the Montana Cowboy Artist (1864-1926) who painted many of the classic cowboy pictures so admired today, once said that,
“An Artist is the only thing you can say you is that nobody can say you ain’t,”
H.L. Mencken said once that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the taste of the American Public.
Banana on the wall is an example of the truth of both of these statements.