WASHINGTON • To buy a banana taped to a wall for US$120,000 (S$163,000) is, believe it or not, a perfectly rational decision.
If it is presented as an artwork by a famous artist with a strong track record and especially if it becomes notorious - which is what happened at warp speed last week to Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian, a banana taped to a wall in a gallery during the annual Art Basel in Miami - it will go up in value. It will be a good investment.
The key to it all, as always, was the media attention.
Comedian quickly went viral. How many artists get this kind of exposure? US$120,000 - for a piece produced in an edition of three (all have sold) - will probably turn out to be a bargain.
What happened to Comedian after it became a media sensation sums up society's collective disorder - a kind of media-based bulimia - exquisitely.
First, at lunchtime last Saturday, David Datuna, a little-known and well-fed-looking performance artist wanting to become better known, showed up at the gallery, took the banana off the wall and, claiming to be a "hungry artist", ate it.
The banana was promptly replaced. Comedian, like Damien Hirst's dead shark, Sol LeWitt's wall drawings and thousands of other works of conceptual art, is about the idea - which, in this case, ironically, is that the art market is insane - not the fruit per se. It comes with an authentication certificate and instructions to the owner to replace the banana every 10 days.
But the crowds at the exhibit got out of hand and posed "a serious health and safety risk, as well as an access issue", according to the gallery. So by Sunday, the final day of Art Basel, Comedian had been taken down.
Then, hours before the fair closed, Roderick Webber, a 46-year-old beret-wearing artist and aspiring politician, scrawled "Epstien (sic) didn't kill himself" in red lipstick on the gallery wall where the banana had been. This was a reference to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in August.
One may have good reason for being angry with Cattelan for causing all this. But he is poking fun at the art market, at himself and at contemporary society in general. He is smart and he can be very funny.
That said, as a provocation and as a work of art, the banana is relatively weak.
Much more intense and provocative was the time Cattelan taped his own dealer, the Italian Massimo de Carlo, to the wall of his gallery.
Comedian is clearly intended as a reprise of this earlier piece, which - needless to say - required a lot more duct tape.
For an art dealer, a more pointed humiliation is hard to imagine. And yet it was gleefully agreed to because in the economy of the art market, it made sense. Everyone profited from it.
What is to blame? Art? The fact that people have senses of humour? This kind of groping for scapegoats is facile.
Why not apportion "blame" to the whole media (and social media) economy, which revolves around an intense fight for people's attention and runs on advertising - advertising which manufactures desire, which stimulates acquisitiveness and produces more wealth, but also more desire, more hype, more waste, more anxiety and more psychic and social dissonance.
Novelist Saul Bellow called it "the moronic inferno". It did not start with Cattelan or with contemporary art. And it will not end with people scrawling conspiracy theories in lipstick on gallery walls.
WASHINGTON POST
