From the Fine Art Connoisseur January/February 2025 Editor’s Note:
Transcending the Circus
Well, you know I have to address it. For over a month now, people have mentioned it the minute they learn I edit a magazine about art collecting.
In November, the world fluttered yet again about the artist provocateur Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) and his latest sensation. The Italian’s conceptual piece, “Comedian” — a yellow banana duct-taped to a white wall exactly 63 inches above the floor — soared past its $1.5 million estimate to sell for $6.2 million (including fees) at Sotheby’s New York. The winner, Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun (b. 1990), beat out six other collectors after a five-minute bidding war. He won the banana (which he proceeded to eat on camera a week later), plus a certificate of authenticity and an instruction manual for how to replace the banana every time it rots. You really could not make this stuff up.
“Comedian” has been attracting attention ever since it debuted at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in December 2019. Any hopes that the subsequent pandemic might quash such nonsense in the art world were dashed, of course, and now its circus of vulgar novelty and conspicuous consumption goes on. (To be sure, there has always been a strand of absurdism in the arts: think of Marcel Duchamp presenting a commercial urinal as a Fountain in 1917, but that was over a century ago and jokes don’t remain amusing quite that long.)
David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, opined that “Comedian” “transcends geographies, language, understanding, cultural differences” and cited “its universality, the way it kind of pierces through the cultural zeitgeist to the very center.” In 2021, Cattelan himself said he does not see Comedian as a “joke,” but rather a “sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value.”
“Sincere” is not a word I would have conjured in this context, but I agree with both men that the visual and intellectual emptiness of “Comedian” perfectly reflect the emptiness of our “cultural zeitgeist.” If this is the only contemporary art that most Americans have heard about, no wonder they think art collecting is a racket, the loathsome love child of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Madison Avenue.
For decades, cynics have noted — quite correctly — that Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” (1503–06) is just a piece of wood covered in oil paint. It has no intrinsic or material value, only the incalculable value of its fame and history. Yes, but it also possesses beauty and meaning; it connects us with its maker and its sitter in powerful, sometimes perplexing, sometimes thrilling, ways. I don’t see anyone connecting powerfully with the banana, or with Maurizio Cattelan. He is justly admired as a brilliant skewerer of our era, and as a brilliant businessman. Yet Leonardo will be remembered for all time; his Italian compatriot will be forgotten within half a century — probably sooner — because satire and publicity stunts get stale so quickly.
This season’s frenzy of irony, cynicism, and commodification has not left me outraged or sad. Rather, it makes me cherish even more keenly the skill, thoughtfulness, and authenticity of the artists highlighted in Fine Art Connoisseur. There is no point in moaning about the global circus of cutting-edge contemporary art. Let’s ignore it and get on with making, viewing, studying, and buying the good stuff.
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