The $6.2 Million Banana

Too much art is a joke that the rich play at the expense of the poor.

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“Art isn’t art unless you can recognize it at a tag sale”

Or so my friend Travis Louie once told me this once. What he meant was that visual art is only visual art if it is imbued with such skill, oomph and mystical numina that people can recognize it regardless of education or cultural context. You know it when you see it¹, even if you see it in the rubble of a bombed out building.

Travis is an artist of astounding technical skill, who paints monsters in Victorian photography tableaux using a jewelers loupe and a single-hair brush. You don’t need an MFA to realize that he can paint . Nor do you have to be a New Yorker. Real art has always smashed through the boundaries between cultures, sparking Creolizations, mashups and blatant thefts. Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints did not arrive in Europe tagged as art, but as wrapping paper for trinkets exported by the Dutch — the nineteenth century equivalent of bubble wrap. Turns out, they didn’t need the label. Kunisada, Hokusai… they were gods from the start to pinky European artists whose tongues couldn’t even begin to caress their names. Those diagonals! Those crops! Those gradiated color seas! The post impressionists went gaga, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh dying to metabolize their lessons. Ukiyo-e prints might have been treated like junk, but they could only be art, because they vibrated with such primordial power.

Conversely, there’s another sort of art, that’s only recognizable in the context of the Art World, that needs an entire edifice of white-cube galleries, buzzy art fairs, money-laundering auction houses, claptrap larded catalog essays and collectors comprised of the very worst humans on earth, in order for anyone to identify it as such. It’s only art inside this monied carapace. It would be junk if you found it at a tag sale. After the apocalypse, could you even differentiate it from the rubble?

Which brings us to the banana.

Two weeks ago, Sotheby’s sold a banana taped to a wall for 6.2 million (fittingly, to a crypto guy — fake art bought with profits made from fake money). Same old same old in the bullshit factory of conceptual art. Except this time, The New York Times interviewed the guy who sold the bullshit artist the banana.

He is Shah Alam, 74 years old, a Bengali uncle who spends twelve hours at a time on his feet on the freezing rain, who will schlep and scrape and slave his entire life and never make as much as some joker with connections to the world of monied fraud. The reporter told Mr. Alam about the money. Mr. Alam began to cry.

*

If Japanese ukiyo-e prints are so purely and absolutely art that they vibrate with art-ness even when they’re used as bubble wrap, then the banana-bullshit is the opposite. It is only “art” because it has been so anointed by the rich. Money makes it art. This money will never reach Mr. Alam or any working stiff like him. Its been skimmed from their labors, to enrich the same ruling class that uses conceptual art as a Veblen object, tax shelter and joke.

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A hundred and nine years ago Marcel Duchamp signed a snow shovel and called it a “readymade” sculpture². At Christies, the bidding has reached $468 million.