UNSETTLING TRUTHS: WHAT A BANANA EXPOSES ABOUT ART, VALUE AND SOCIETY
As an art teacher, I frequently discuss art with my students, and one burning question that never fails to arise is: ‘Why is some art so expensive? They’ve seen the headlines, the staggering sums paid for paintings or sculptures, and they can’t help but wonder: What makes these objects worth millions?
One of the most recent examples I like to use to address this question is Maurizio Cattelan’s famous piece, 'Comedian': a banana duct-taped to a wall. When it first hit the headlines in 2019, many dismissed it as a joke or even an insult to the art world. Cattelan himself, explained that 'Comedian' was a comment on, and a critique of, the absurdity of the art market.
The piece’s premise is simple: in today’s world, almost anything, even the most banal object, can be transformed into something valuable and commodified. When the banana was sold for $120,000 in 2019, and later for a mind-boggling $6.2 million in 2024, 'Comedian' proved Cattelan’s point: value in art is a social construct, and art is deeply entangled in our consumerist society.
But the banana’s rise to fame did more than proving Cattelan’s point. The buzz, the media, the curators, the bidders, the auction houses, and even the spectators, all contributed to its becoming. This is the level of Cattelan’s piece that makes it so intriguing. It is more than just a piece of art hanging on a wall; it is an ongoing participatory performance that only comes to life through the very system it critiques. Without it, the banana would remain just that: a duct-taped fruit.
The next chapter in 'Comedian’s' participatory performance unfolds as the banana inevitably begins to rot. In line with Cattelan’s instructions, the decaying banana must regularly be replaced with a fresh one. This act of replacement is critical: the old banana loses its cultural significance and returns to its original form as a perishable commodity. This predetermined act of replacement completes the cycle of consumerism, a system where objects are discarded or replaced once they lose their novelty or usefulness, replaced by something newer and more desirable.
Another significant act in the ongoing performance occurred when artist David Datuna forcefully removed the banana from the exhibition wall and ate it at Art Basel in Miami Beach in 2019. Datuna, who titled his act ‘Hungry Artist’, explained that it was a commentary on the hunger for art and the hunger for fame in the contemporary art world. His act of devouring the banana worth $120.000 million (at the time) tapped into something deeply symbolic and archaic. In consuming the glorified banana, Datuna absorbed not just the material object but also the cultural and social power it had accumulated. It became a ritualistic act. While the fame, attention, and buzz surrounding the banana temporarily shifted to the artist, the individual fruit was symbolically reduced back to its original function as a simple commodity. (The artwork itself was not destroyed, as replacing the banana was an integral part of the concept.)
Similarly, when Justin Sun purchased one of the three 'Comedians' in 2024, he not only participated in another act of the 'Comedian' performance but also permanently secured his place in contemporary art history. But when he too decided to eat his freshly purchased $6.2 million banana, he added another distinctly different layer of meaning to the performance.
Sun's final act, created in an entirely different context from Datuna, feels more like a demonstration of power and control over abstract value than a ritualistic ingestion of glory. With his $6.2 million bid Sun was able to create the value of the 'Comedian' while his subsequent consuming of the banana was at least a symbolic destruction of that same value that had been assigned to the art piece. Given that Sun is the creator of the cryptocurrency TRON, another form of abstract value that exists solely through collective belief in its worth, this act carries unsettling implications.
For my students, this is more than a modern-day fable (the emperor’s new clothes comes to mind). It’s a fascinating glimpse into the mechanisms behind how value is created, how it can be manipulated, and how it can shift with the tide of collective belief. It’s a reminder that art, cryptocurrency and in fact a whole lot of other very important values that we share in our society are social constructs, products of a shared consensus, valuable, fragile and in serious need of safeguarding.
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