The Banana

Mauricio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019

The banana is dumb. Unlike those who mill about in its vicinity. First among equals is Maurizio Cattelan, the banana’s progenitor, whose knack for attention-getting provocations is a clear sign of a versatile intelligence. Next is Justin Sun, who bought the banana at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million on November 20th. Inventor of the crypto-currency Tron and possessor of a large fortune, Sun is obviously no slouch in the brain department. And there is plenty of professional-grade brain power at work in the auctioneers, critics, curators, and dealers who ushered the banana—or Comedian, 2019, as it is properly known—onto the art-world scene and made it the object of the persistent attention that culminated in the work’s recent sale. Intelligence, however, is not a communicable quality. Though many bright people have interacted with the banana, the banana remains irredeemably dumb.

After all, it’s just another readymade in the long line of readymades that reaches back to 1913, when Marcel Duchamp inverted a bicycle wheel and mounted it on a wooden stool. To name the result, simply, Bicycle Wheel and present it as a work of art was to administer a shock to many in the art world and beyond, indubitably, but this impudent object did not render painting and sculpture obsolete. Far from it, and as the years went by Bicycle Wheel acquired the look of an exercise in shock for shock’s sake: one of those clever maneuvers that exhausts itself in the execution. And it wasn’t as original as art historians still say it was. A year before Duchamp built Bicycle Wheel, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso invented collage, the practice of pasting swatches of newsprint and wallpaper—two-dimensional readymades—to the surfaces of their paintings.

Robert Morris once told me a story about a panel discussion held at the Museum of Modern Art. The panelists were Duchamp, Alfred Barr, the museum’s director, and William Rubin, head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture. According to Morris, Rubin labored to persuade Duchamp to reveal the formal precedents for his readymade sculptures. This was a mug’s game. Duchamp spent his career disrupting the flow of formal development that historians like Rubin try to chart, and so frustration followed frustration as Duchamp fended off Rubin’s stubbornly pointless inquiries. Finally, Barr said, “But, Marcel, why are the readymades so beautiful?” Duchamps replied, “Nobody’s perfect.”

This is witty, as Duchamp’s quips often were, and it gets at a crucial point: perfection, for Duchamp, would have been an artwork that appeals solely to the mind, leaving vision in the lurch. He never attained that ideal. To count as an artist, you have to make visible things, an obligation Duchamp could not elude. Even those conceptual artists of the 1970s who taped typewritten texts to gallery walls gave viewers something to look at, in installations at once scruffy and ironically elegant. Moreover, Barr was right about Duchamp’s readymades; they are often beautiful—see, especially, Bottlerack, 1914. Aesthetes of Barr’s acuity see beauty that others overlook.

On a trip to America, in 1882, Oscar Wilde informed Chicagoans that their city suffered from a nearly universal unattractiveness, with one exception. “Your machinery,” he said, “is beautiful.” So are sunsets and newly blooming flowers. Artworks are a subset of the world’s vast array of aesthetically pleasing things. With his readymades, Duchamp readjusted the border between art and a handful of non-art objects: what was merely utilitarian became, by fiat, aesthetic. This was an administrative procedure and not, I think, all that interesting. You can point to the precedent this provided for later artists, but we should be careful here.

What is interesting about Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962? Is it our experience of the painting or our dutiful thought that Warhol employed the Duchampian tactic of displacing an image found in a publicity photo from the realm of non-art to the loftier realm of fine art? I find the answer obvious because the tactic is not complex, hence not engaging. I get it and move on in search of whatever interest Gold Marilyn Monroe has as a painting. Faced with Jeff Koons’s uses of readymade objects and images, I never see anything to move on to. The results of his Duchampian displacements are vacuous. Dumb. But not as dumb, perhaps, as the banana.

Again, the banana is dumb but Catellan is not. Nor is Koons. They know how to attract extraordinary amounts of attention for doing what they do, though no one has ever figured out what that is. That may be because our attention is misplaced. Rather than focus on these artists’ behavior it would be better to ask what their works do. The banana, for the moment’s salient example, provides a still point around which the art world’s moving parts can organize themselves. Auctioneers, dealers, art advisers, collectors, artists, all the varieties of art commentator, and even members of the non-art press have at the very least trained a long, fascinated stare on the banana and some have become obsessed with it. Of course, the banana-buzz will die down, sooner rather than later, and the art world will return its attention to serious art. Yeah, right.

Many denizens of the art world are interested primarily in belonging to the art world. They love the fun and the socio-economic cachet this glamorous subculture provides. But they do not love the challenges provided by serious art, so they pay attention to unserious, undemanding art. And they are especially grateful when this trivial stuff manages, like Catellan’s Comedian, to foster the impression that it has stirred up a fuss about something important. What a boon it is to an unserious mind to be handed a pretext for pretending that its latest preoccupation is justified by its profundity. Saving its fans so much intellectual and emotional labor, the banana acquires an aura of historical significance. In truth, it is significant, not in the history of art but in the history of the Western mind’s increasing vacuousness. In seasons lacking a sensation like the banana, there is trivial art of all kinds to create voids on which unserious attention can focus. I’m thinking chiefly of illustrative and decorative painting.

Now it is time for me to qualify substantially much of what I have just said. First, the contemporary art world is replete with serious people, first among them serious artists. Much art criticism, these days, is just descriptive, promotional fluff turned out by people who don’t seem to know that what makes a work of art important is not its price or its stylishness but the possibilities for meaning that it offers. Yet there are still serious critics, serious historians and curators and dealers. Too often, though, they work in an odd sort of darkness, the penumbra that descends on those who stand outside the white-hot glare given off by money-driven triviality.

This darkness covers certain artists who are considered important for good reason and may even have strong markets but, because of their seriousness, do not inspire mindless buzz. Which artists do I have in mind, you might ask, and it’s a fair question. But I don’t want to name names, pick favorites, generate a measure, however small, of art-world buzz. It is up to each of us to seek out good art for ourselves and on our own terms. The very nature of art gives us this responsibility.