The Six Million Dollar Banana

Why I Find Conceptual Artists Inspiring

Photograph: John Angelillo/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

Catch-up service:
The Ad That Radicalised Me
The Unreal Thing
Are You Charismatic or Charming?
Why Does Donald Trump Keep Happening?
The Historian and the Culture Warrior
The Orangutan Theory of Intelligence

Next Saturday (December 7th) I’m singing in an advent carol concert, with the London Concert Choir. It’s at St Columba’s Church in Knightsbridge. We have a beautiful and eclectic selection of carols. Come along!

Below: why I find controversial conceptual art oddly inspiring. Plus: thoughts on Britain’s embrace of assisted dying and a rattle bag of fascinating and beautiful things, including a must-watch documentary.

The banana was bought for 35 cents from a fruit stand in Manhattan on the morning of the auction. It was stuck to the wall at Sotheby’s with duct tape, thus assuming its form as an artwork. Comedian, by Maurizio Cattelan, was then sold to the highest bidder for $5.2 million ($6.2m with fees). Its new owner is a Chinese celebrity crypto entrepreneur called Justin Sun.

For his money, Sun received the banana, a roll of tape, installation instructions, and a certificate of authenticity signed by Cattelan. After his purchase, Sun said, “In the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honouring its place in both art history and popular culture.” On Friday, he ate the banana before the media, at a press conference in Hong Kong.

Comedian dates to 2019, when three editions of it were sold at at Art Basel in Miami (which takes place in the same week as the Miami Art Fair, where Jaguar will unveil its new model). Another artist, David Datuma, ripped the banana off the wall and ate it. The resulting publicity - front page of the New York Post: ‘BANANAS: ART WORLD GONE MAD’ - only increased the artwork’s price. In a sense, the publicity is the artwork. The materials of Comedian are fruit, tape, and story. Only one of those has value.

In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan framed Comedian as a satirical commentary on contemporary art: “At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules.” Conceptual artworks like this have a recursive quality: the more people talk about them, the more value they acquire, the more people talk about them, and so on.

That’s essentially how crypto works too, and Justin Sun relishes the parallel. He says Comedian "represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community. I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history." He no doubt expects it to inflate the value of his cryptocurrency. Cattelan sees himself as entrepreneur as much as artist. Sun sees himself as an artist of financial technologies. Comedian sees them both laughing their way to the bank.

Cattelan is an artist of controversy. When the world says “This is utterly crazy!” he enthusiastically agrees. The bafflement and outrage Comedian generates is not external to the work but incorporated into it - it’s the whole point. Here’s how Matthew Slotover, co-founder of London’s Frieze Art Fair, explains Comedian: “It’s a provocation, it’s meant to be ridiculous…It’s an absurd thing to do and absurd that people would pay money for it, but that is very much a part of the work.”

Artists like Cattelan are akin to populists and influencers who use controversy to fuel their ascent. Negative reactions are incorporated into “the work”, enemies become accomplices. You might demand that art aim higher than this - that it stand outside the media maelstrom, and the whole system of getting and spending. The conceptual artist replies, there is no outside anymore, and thanks for boosting my brand.

If I don’t get outraged by this kind of thing it’s partly because I don’t wish to play the game I’m being invited to play, but also because I have genuine admiration for Cattelan. I think anyone engaged in a creative endeavour, very broadly defined, can learn from him.

I don’t admire Cattelan as an artist, or regard Comedian as a work of art. I do admire him as a marketer, and Comedian as a product. Cattelan is a narrative entrepreneur who has consistently found new and compelling stories to tell and sell.

No, I don’t believe “anyone could do it”. I agree with Slotover when he says, “Some artists are just better than others [at conceptual art]. They do it in a more interesting way, at the right time, in the right context and understand what they’re doing better than others.”

In 2016 Cattelan created a toilet made of gold and called it America. It was installed in the actual bathroom of the Guggenheim museum in New York. Thousands queued to use it. That is an ingenious, timely idea. In 2019 America went out on loan, to Blenheim Palace, former seat (sorry) of the Duke of Marlborough, and somebody stole it from there. Its whereabouts are currently unknown. I presume that Cattelan didn’t organise the theft, but if America ever turns up, it will be worth a lot more than it was. Being stolen makes a good story even better - witness the history of the Mona Lisa. This suggests a good ambition for the artist and the marketer: make something people want to steal.

Conceptual art can be copied and reproduced and yet retain its value, which makes it more like a product than an artwork (there are several versions of Duchamp’s toilet). Authenticity still counts, however. Cattelan’s certificate is a guarantor of value. Walter Benjamin identified the “aura” of a work of art as its unique presence in time and space - as something that reproductions in film and photography could never capture. The banana and tape in Comedian have no unique presence. The aura is the story, which is authored, and authorised, by Cattelan.

If you don’t think he is a great artist, you ought to admire Cattelan’s success all the more. What I admire about him is this: he is self-authorising. Yes, he depends, to some extent, on the authority of institutions like Sotheby’s, but they cooperate with him because he has been so successful at creating his own aura, despite not having the kind of talents and skills possessed by a Francis Bacon or even an Andy Warhol. He has invented his authorising story out of nothing.

A lot of people struggle with doubts about their own authority - their right to do something or be something. When I started writing my book about the Beatles, it took me a while to stop worrying that I wasn’t a music writer, or that the world didn’t need another book about this group. But some artists, writers, entrepreneurs and leaders, seem to just seize authority for themselves like generals carrying out a bloodless cultural coup. I’m still stumped by how Lennon and McCartney self-identified as artists, rather than just a pop act, from so early on.

One of my favourite books about writing is by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It’s called Several Short Sentences About Writing. It’s written like poetry, full of pithy, luminous declarations. One of the themes he develops is that novice writers need to learn to trust what they notice - to trust that their own particular perceptions are important. Until they do that, they’re just trying to guess what others find important and writing about that.

It’s easy to assume that everyone else has noticed what we’ve noticed - “that the world has been completely pre-noticed”, as Klinkenborg puts it. But there’s always something new to notice, and something more to say, and you need to steal the right to say it. Here’s Klinkenborg:

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself….
No one else can authorize you.
No one.¹

Cattelan is perpetually self-authorising. I may not agree that he making art, but I admire his chutzpah. If he can authorise himself, I can too.

---

Elliot Erwitt, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York City, 1988. Anyone who has watched Maestro will immediately make the connection.

Rattle Bag

• I’m saddened by parliament’s decision make “assisted dying” legal. It isn’t just that, as I came to believe over the last few weeks, it’s wrong. It’s that the whole thing felt so unserious. The arguments of the bill’s supporters were meagre, the process was deeply inadequate. The supporters barely listened to the critics or got to grips with the detail but merely repeated the same simplistic points while imputing bad faith to opponents. Afterwards, they talked of being ‘delighted’ which seems impossibly glib. I like to think that even if I was on that side of that debate I’d feel the weight of this decision. I’d worry it was the wrong one. If the bill had failed to pass, I would not have felt delight.

• This report by the Guardian on how the bill has divided Labour MPs quite bitterly should be worrying for the government. I can’t quite believe that, while patently failing to get to grips with the list of urgent challenges facing the UK, Starmer thought this was the moment to introduce such a hotly contested issue to the country. It was a private members bill but he could quite easily have headed it off, or at the very least kept away from it. In fact, he did the worst thing of all, letting everyone know he backed it and then stepping aside, thus reinforcing the perception that he manoeuvres but doesn’t lead. I don’t think we yet know what destabilising and corrosive emotions the passing of this bill will unleash among Labour MPs and within the cabinet. I would bet that Wes Streeting, for instance, now has a fundamentally different relationship with the PM than he did before the bill.

• When the last Labour government came to power in 1997, the country felt young again. This Labour government took office five months ago with a generational majority and a mandate for national renewal. What have been the three biggest political debates since then, all initiated by the government? Means testing of the the winter fuel allowance for pensioners; inheritance tax for farmers; assisted dying. Ageing, death, death.

  

• The UK has the second largest HR sector in the world. It also has one of the slowest rates of productivity growth among developed countries. Hmm.

• OK, a more positive story about Britain (and a narrative violation): it’s one of the only advanced countries to have seen an increase in the share of national income going to workers over the last 25 years.

• The brilliant pollster and political analyst James Kanagasooriam has started a Substack, sign up if that’s your bag.

• “All artist-critics are to some extent secret proselytisers for their own work; they are all secret agents.” Superb essay by Martin Amis on V.S. Pritchett from 1980.

• The Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix is fascinating. I had no idea I was interested in her, until a friend-of-the-Ruffian suggested I watch it. After about ten minutes I was completely gripped. I had no idea what a hardscrabble background she came from. And I didn’t understand quite what an incredible businesswoman she was. When her media empire floated she became the first female self-made billionaire. She was then felled by a US government case against her for insider trading. As it turned out, she wasn’t guilty of it. But the FBI, which had invested its reputation in this case, took the unusual step of prosecuting her anyway, on the basis that she had misled them during the investigation. They won and she went to prison. The prosecutor leading the case? James Comey, who can claim to have ended the career of the two most high-profile women of the twenty-first century. The doc’s portrait of nineties and early 2000s sexual politics is grimly revealing. After prison, Stewart could no longer do the thing she was born to do, which is run a business, and has had to be content with being a social media influencer, which seems beneath her. She is interviewed for the documentary, and retains a frosty grandeur. In fact what makes the doc so gripping is not just the incredible story arc but the complicated, difficult, impressive, if not necessarily likeable character at the centre of it (btw the story of her personal life is just as fascinating as the business story). I came away admiring her hugely, and liking her somewhat too, if only because she cares so little about being liked. A case study in charisma over charm.

• This Apple hearing aid ad is an absolutely ruthless assault on the tear ducts. Resistance is futile.

• The soundtrack to the new Beatles ‘64 documentary on Disney includes this killer version of Yesterday by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, which brings out the song’s subtle, dark beauty.

1. You can read the whole passage courtesy of Austin Kleon.