Banana sold for $6 million

Started by relm1, November 22, 2024, 05:46:16 AM

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relm1

Can someone please explain the banana art?  Why did a banana sell for $6 million dollars?


What am I not understanding?  It was literally a banana purchased for 32 cents taped to a wall and sold for $6 million dollars.

Brian

I guess that's the price of being savvy enough to try it. I certainly never would have thought of it!

(What happens when the banana goes bad?)

Florestan

"Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory." — Thomas Beecham

San Antone

Someone with more money than they know what to do with wanted bragging rights.  Bragging that they have so much money, $6mil wouldn't even be noticed, and spending that much on a banana would be front page news. Congrats to the artist.

Kalevala

Quote from: Brian on November 22, 2024, 06:22:58 AMI guess that's the price of being savvy enough to try it. I certainly never would have thought of it!

(What happens when the banana goes bad?)
I wondered that too.  By the way, if I'm not mistaken, didn't someone steal the original banana?

K

(poco) Sforzando

Quote from: relm1 on November 22, 2024, 05:46:16 AMCan someone please explain the banana art?  Why did a banana sell for $6 million dollars?


What am I not understanding?  It was literally a banana purchased for 32 cents taped to a wall and sold for $6 million dollars.

But $1 million of that was the Sotheby's fee. It was actually a lot cheaper than $6 million.
"I don't know what sforzando means, though it clearly means something."

Mandryka

#6
They did not buy a banana for $5M. They bought a work of art which is made of a banana. In a similar way, Michelangelo's Creation of Adam is not plaster and paint, it is made of plaster and paint. The value is due to what it is, not what it is made from.

Just a point of detail. This is an installation. What the person actually bought was instructions about how to make the art object and the right to install it and call it whatever it is called. A bit like a play script.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Dry Brett Kavanaugh

I just have remembered a philosophical discussion: If two artists made physically identical works for different themes, are they same work or different?

Ie. Artist A- abstract painting with red and blue titled "Anxiety 2020". Artist B- abstract painting with red and blue titled "Passion in Mexico".

DavidW

Quote from: Mandryka on November 22, 2024, 01:17:59 PMThey did not buy a banana for $5M. They bought a work of art which is made of a banana. In a similar way, Michelangelo's Creation of Adam is not plaster and paint, it is made of plaster and paint. The value is due to what it is, not what it is made from.

Just a point of detail. This is an installation. What the person actually bought was instructions about how to make the art object and the right to install it and call it whatever it is called. A bit like a play script.

Michelangelo was a great artist. This is a banana stuck to the wall by a piece of duct tape. The emperor has no clothes.

Kalevala

Quote from: DavidW on November 22, 2024, 03:03:21 PMMichelangelo was a great artist. This is a banana stuck to the wall by a piece of duct tape. The emperor has no clothes.
Agree!

K

LKB

The purchaser was foolish. I know my bananas, and there's no way that one is worth more than 4 million, or maybe 5, tops.  ;D
Mit Flügeln, die ich mir errungen...

steve ridgway

They're hoping the art will be a profitable investment ;D .

Roasted Swan

The real "Art" of this particular deal is getting someone to part with $6 million........

Madiel

The particular stupidity in this case is that anyone who so chooses can quite readily buy a banana and a piece of duct tape and make something that will look remarkably like the installation without following the instructions.

In other words, it's an exceptionally easy piece of art to forge. And I don't say that lightly. There are lots of works of art where people more or less say "I can do that" and I'm not sure that they're right. But in this case, when what you're buying is the instructions and naming rights, it's really quite easy to say that somebody besides the artist could create the physical work because someone beside the artist will be creating the physical work. Or not, when they get bored with the idea.

On reflection there are some similarities with John Cage's 4'33'', only Cage never tried to get anybody to buy exclusive performing rights for millions of dollars.
Freedom of speech means you get to speak in response to what I said.

Mandryka

#14
Quote from: Kalevala on November 22, 2024, 05:25:49 PMAgree!

K


Do you like the Warhol banana more?



Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

By the way, the artwork which sold at Sotheby's was one of a limited edition of three.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Florestan

"Art" has long since ceased to be a meaningful word. This is not the first piece of shit masquerading as "art" nor will it be the last. As for the obscene prices at which they are sold, well, stupidity is infinite --- as apparently is the capacity to rationalize/intellectualize any piece of shit masquerading as "art".
"Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory." — Thomas Beecham

Florestan

#17
Quote from: Dry Brett Kavanaugh on November 22, 2024, 02:52:22 PMI just have remembered a philosophical discussion: If two artists made physically identical works for different themes, are they same work or different?

Ie. Artist A- abstract painting with red and blue titled "Anxiety 2020". Artist B- abstract painting with red and blue titled "Passion in Mexico".

The true meaning of an abstract, red-and-blue painting is "The Public Has No Clue and Neither Has the Artist".  :P
"Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory." — Thomas Beecham

Cato

Quote from: San Antone on November 22, 2024, 06:35:41 AM
Someone with more money than they know what to do with wanted bragging rights.  Bragging that they have so much money, $6mil wouldn't even be noticed, and spending that much on a banana would be front page news.
Congrats to the artist.


Rather: Congrats to the "con artist."   ;)

"Con" does not come from "convict," although the con artist eventually will be  - or has been - a convict.

The original term was a "confidence man," meaning that the criminal would inveigle a person into believing that he could be trusted as a friend, i.e. the person would take the criminal "into his confidence," and trust him.

The "confidence man" would then swindle the person out of his money.

Thomas Mann's last novel was an expansion of his earlier short story: The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.

Selling instructions on taping a banana to a wall for $6 Million!  San Antone is right, however: I do not think this was a cheat, but a terrible amount of ego wasting $6 million, which could have gone to something worthwhile!

Just because a person has money does not prevent said person from the most selfish idiocy.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

pjme

I found this reflection on the banana:


"Many of the responses to Maurizio Cattelan's 'Comedian' – the banana taped to the wall at Art Basel Miami Beach – take a familiar stance, decrying a fundamental superficiality or worse in his comic approach – intent to defraud, for instance, or a desire to 'put one over' on the audience. Jerry Saltz for one, fulminates against 'joke art, shock-your-Nana-art, art about art about art.' 
However, there is also some more thoughtful commentary which recognises that Cattelan's comedy can co-exist with substance.In the New York Times Jason Farag notes the 'dismayingly common belief that all artists are con artists,' observing that Cattelan's 'purloined banana has offered the perfect weapon to those who think that contemporary art is one big prank.' However, he is clear that ''Comedian' is not a one-note Dadaist imposture in which a commodity is proclaimed a work of art — which would be an entire century out of date now,' and suggests instead that the work is of a piece with Cattelan's ongoing critique of the art world. He argues that the banana should be seen in the context of an earlier piece, 'A Perfect Day' (1999), in which Cattelan used duct tape to fasten his dealer Massimo De Carlo to a gallery wall, for the duration of a show's opening day, thus placing 'the art market itself on the wall, drooping and pitiful.' 
And 'rather than lobbing insults from a cynical distance,' Farag commends Cattelan's 'willingness to implicate himself within the economic, social and discursive systems that structure how we see and what we value.' Because, although Farag doesn't say this outright, 'Comedian' is perhaps first and foremost a self-portrait. And, as Jonathan Jones suggests, it is a deeply melancholy one: '[h]e's the clown who has to go on clowning when he knows his jokes don't do any good.' 
In place of his dealer, it is now Cattelan himself taped to the wall – taking on that disparaging label, 'comedian,' in a wryly reductive account of himself and his career. The impulse to deflate pretension that is so crucial a drive in his oeuvre, is equally unsparing when directed at himself. The poignancy of that personal sense of failure is augmented by the fruit's rapidly aging flesh, a clear acknowledgement of mortality (the notes to the work suggest the fruit should be replaced every 10 days). Interestingly, Cattelan first created versions in bronze and resin, which would have effectively lost some of that mordancy, while also legitimising the piece through craft or labour, making it less anxiety provoking.Taped as it is to the wall, Farag stresses the fact of the banana's suspension as a way of placing it within a longer lineage, thus emphasising the analytic processes behind the work – it is not a con, or a one-off stunt, but part of a considered approach. 
He mentions Cattelan's 'Novecento' (1997), 'a taxidermied horse suspended from a Baroque ceiling like a drooping chandelier [which] collapses ... the martial pomposity of the Fascists', and 'La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi' (2000) (We Are the Revolution), a miniature doll of the artist, sheepishly suspended from a coat rack. And in his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim, Cattelan 'diminished all his previous works by suspending them from hooks in the center of the gallery, like laundry hung out to dry.' Cattelan's use of suspension as a technique is thus as valid as say, brush strokes and colour are to painting, and effectively transforms an object into something both ridiculous and pathetic. It is a comic procedure Elder Olson describes as the 'minimisation of the claim of some particular thing to be taken seriously, either by reducing that claim to absurdity, or by reducing it merely to the negligible in such a way as to produce pleasure by that very minimisation' (23). Olson opposes comedy's timely devaluation of overvalued goods to tragedy's belated bestowal of value, but this ignores the tragic potential of that devaluation or deflation: the loss of sublimity for instance, and the loss of mastery or authority. Necessary losses, to be sure, but still painful. 

Cascone, Sarah, 'Maurizio Cattelan Is Taping Bananas to a Wall at Art Basel Miami Beach and Selling Them for $120,000 Each,' Artnet, 4 Dec 2019 https://news.artnet.com/market/maurizio-cattelan-banana-art-basel-miami-beach-1722516Farago, Jason, 'A (Grudging) Defense of the $120,000 Banana,' New York Times, 8 Dec 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/a-critics-defense-of-cattelan-banana-.htmlJones, Jonathan,  'Don't make fun of the $120,000 banana – it's in on the joke,' The Guardian, 9 Dec 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/09/the-art-world-is-bananas-thats-what-maurizio-cattelans-been-saying-all-alongOlson, Elder. The Theory of Comedy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968© Emma Sullivan, University of Edinburgh, 2019."