Last month, when Spanish conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan’s artwork Comedian – a piece widely known as his ‘banana-taped-to-gallery-wall’ work – sold at auction for GBP 4.8 million, many were left scratching their heads in disbelief.
The work, which the artist first presented at Art Basel Miami in 2019 and sold at the time for around GBP 93,000, sparked controversy and divided critics on whether or not it was worthy of attention at all.
Among the sceptics back in 2019 were the commentators of influential art journal Artnet, who dismissed the piece as a ludicrous joke aimed at duping wealthy collectors into buying bananas as a form of high art.
Well, yes… That was exactly the artist’s point, and it is also why millions of art enthusiasts still gravitate to the work on social media and every time it is shown at public galleries and museums, to see ‘the banana’ for themselves and laugh out loud at how daft certain aspects of the art world have become.
The piece also raises intriguing questions about how artists like Cattelan can continue to get away with putting ordinary items like bananas in art galleries and have them applauded by art world gatekeepers who embrace them as ‘significant’ and ‘important’ pieces.
In this way, the work continues a thread started by the likes of early 20th century conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, and prompts discussion around how modern day capitalist societies assign cultural ‘value’ to certain things over others, and how markedly different these values are from other societies (both past and present).
But when this particular ‘joke artwork’ sold at auction for millions of dollars a few weeks ago, and ever since its buyer – a young cryptocurrency millionaire owner – has added his own layer of conceptual meaning to the work, it has taken on connotations that are less about the art world’s legacy, and more about how systems of commerce and industry are fuelling deepening inequalities in our world today.
A cryptocurrency millionaire with an eye on art history
When the Sotheby’s auction hammer came down on the sale of Cattelan’s Comedian artwork (one of three banana works in the artist’s limited edition series), the highest bidder was 34-year-old crypto-currency millionaire, Justin Sun.
While Sun is everything you may expect from a Silicon Valley tycoon (young, male and highly ambitious), his path to entering the super-rich ‘tech-bro’ club contains a few anomalies.
For a start, he is not a tech graduate from an Ivy League university. Instead, he is an art history major (a graduate of Peking University in China, and then Pennsylvanian University in the US) and aside from running his crypto businesses, he is an avid collector of art.
So while it’s tempting to criticise Sun for being just another wealthy art collector who has more dollars than sense, his purchase of Comedian comes from a place of genuine knowledge about, and passion for, contemporary art and art history.
Yet the events that came after Sun’s record-breaking purchase of his super-expensive ‘art banana’ blur the lines between art, commerce and power to create a bizarre cocktail that speaks volumes about the shape of many capitalist societies today.
Next-level conceptual farce? Or a spotlight on disturbing truths?
This is because, soon after purchasing Comedian at auction, Sun called a press conference at one of Hong Kong’s most expensive hotels, where, in front of a pile of cameras and journalists, he proceeded to eat his multimillion-dollar banana artwork in a splashy PR move, where he made his own ‘conceptual’ statement about the work in relation to his area of business – the world of non-fungible tokens (NFT) and blockchain technology.
As he told AFP reporters at this press conference, just like Cattelan’s artwork, “Most [NFT] objects and ideas exist as intellectual property… as opposed to something physical.”
He added that he thinks the price of his Comedian piece will surely go up in the future – “just like Bitcoin”.
And, of course, in eating the artwork – whether he did so in front of the press or not – the monetary value of his investment was unaffected, because what he purchased at auction was the ‘idea’ of the banana being taped to the wall, and as its current owner he is responsible for replacing the banana-on-the-wall part of that work every time a banana goes bad.
But if Sun’s post-purchase media stunt is not enough to reflect the self-serving pretentiousness of the high-end art market, the entrepreneur’s next moves have taken things to another level altogether.
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In what was no doubt intended as a charitable act of grace, the tech-millionaire recently announced that he wanted to ‘thank’ the vendor of the fruit stall who first sold Maurizio Cattelan the bananas for his original artwork.
He did this by pledging to buy 100,000 more bananas from this New York fruit stand, and give these bananas away to anyone who showed up at the stall in time to get one.
As Sun announced on X: “To thank Mr Shah Alam, I’ve decided to buy 100,000 bananas from his stand in New York’s Upper East Side. These bananas will be distributed free worldwide through his stand. Show a valid ID to claim one banana, while supplies last.”
But when The New York Times reporters interviewed the fruit stall vendor, a man named Shah Alam, they discovered that, as one of the fruit stall’s six employees, Alam – who works 12-hour shifts for US$12 an hour – would likely not receive any extra money from Sun’s impending order.
Then, once the news outlet tracked down Alam’s employer, the fruit stall’s owner, it became clear that no one at the retail end of this banana supply chain would benefit from Sun’s giant order very much at all.
The fruit stall owner explained that such a large order was logistically unfeasible (it would likely take many months to confirm), and the profits generated would not really make the extra trouble worthwhile (Sun’s US$25,000 order would result in an estimated US$6000 profit for the fruit stall owner).
The New York Times interviewed several other fruit stall employees for their story as well, and soon became aware that Sun had not actually contacted anyone at the fruit and vegetable stand before announcing his pledge on X, and was also “not personally familiar with the exact cost of the bananas”.
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At this point, one can’t help but see this story as going far beyond the scope of an artist’s wry joke. Instead, the work has morphed into a bruising exposé of how some economies are being fuelled by the power of super-rich entrepreneurs who call the shots from elite positions where they have little idea of the ‘real costs’ of tangible goods that are (quite literally) putting food on the table for millions of people around the world.
Instead, these super-rich seem to be operate at vast distances from those who work in the world of mass labour, in financial systems where their intellectual property of their non-tangible ‘goods’, ‘unreal’ assets and currencies are underpinning their extreme wealth.
If early 20th century European artists hadn’t been first with the term ‘surrealist’ back in the 1920s, this label is surely the right one to describe the almost unfathomable cycles of commerce that are encouraging such disturbing levels of social stratification.
So, if art does indeed act as a mirror to our society, Cattelan’s Comedian artwork has succeeded in revealing a concerning picture that is perhaps best described by one of the employees of the same New York fruit stall where the artist first bought the bananas for his original work.
Summarising the journey of a handful of bananas being randomly sold to an artist at his street stall, through to a Sotheby’s auction house and then to a cryptocurrency millionaire, this fruit and vegetable seller needed very few words to express his feelings to the The New York Times.
As he said very simply and succinctly, from where he stands, “it’s definitely an inequality”.
