We are not in a time where we are easily frightened by foreign eccentricitiesbut the fact that a gentleman would spend more than six million dollars to become the owner of a mondo and lirondo banana, stuck to a wall with duct tape, leaves us perplexed. If we dig deeper into the news and discover that six more individuals bid for the famous banana at an auction held at Sotheby’s, at its New York headquarters, we go from perplexity to stupefaction. He Italian Maurizio Cattelan He is a true artist, if not Comedian (the name of this specific piece), yes, of an enormous power of seduction to convince someone, in this case Justin Sun, a powerful businessman, a pioneer in the world of cryptocurrencies, that he was making history by buying no he aforementioned and perishable bananabut all an artistic experience. Justin Sun is now the owner of a certificate of authenticity that allows him to reproduce the work as many times as he wants.
© Getty ImagesMaurizio Cattelan was born in Italy, is sixty-four years old, and began his artistic career in hyperrealism and has led to he hilarity: Is he laughing at us or is he inviting us to put aside visual pleasure in favor of the morbidity produced by imagining how far he is going to go and how far the art collectors are they going to follow him? Comedian, His most famous installation was presented for the first time in 2019, during the prestigious Art Basel fair in Miami. Here is the work: a banana bought in a Miami fruit store, a gray adhesive tape, and the white wall to which it was stuck. Neither more nor less. In 2019, he sold the work for $120,000 and the world turned its eyes towards him and towards another artist, David Datuna, a visual artist from Georgia, a resident of the Big Apple, who was passing by. Datuna gave a new dimension to Comedian, when he did not hesitate to remove the banana from the adhesive tape and ate it before the eyes of those attending the fair. A performance, baptized as Hungry Artist.
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© Getty ImagesJustin Sunthe current owner of the facility, He also plans to devour the banana as the culmination of his artistic experience, as he expressed in X: “I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.” Justin Sun has not bought, therefore, a mere banana badly stuck to the wall, but, pay attention to the information, a roll of adhesive tape, precise instructions on how to stick the fruit to the wall, and the certificate of authenticity of the one that previously We talked and that ensures that every time Mr. Sun places a banana on the wall, following the creator’s instructions, he will achieve the original of Cattelan’s work.
Justin Sun, the founder of the platform cryptocurrencies TRONhas been enthusiastic about his purchase and has justified his outlay in the following terms: “This is not just a work of art; “It represents a cultural phenomenon that unites the worlds of art, memes and the cryptocurrency community.” Maybe he’s right, and maybe you have to open your mind to understand unconventional art formsbut… long six million dollars?
© Getty ImagesBackground and current events
In 1886, Vincent Van Gogh He painted a pair of a peasant’s shoes. Nothing more and nothing less. The painting generated an entire philosophical debate at the time around the eternal question: What is a work of art? Martin Heidegger himself wrote a booklet, The origin of works of art, in which he reflected on why the Dutch painter’s canvas was an artistic piece. Heidegger warned that behind the brush strokes there was much more: the old boots represented the enormous work, the enormous effort, of the old peasants. That is to say, Heidegger announced that the work of art is not so much what is tangible, which in many cases is also what it generates inside the receiver. Along these lines, the revolutionary works of the Belgian René Magritte in his day (the representation of a pipe under which one reads: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, this is not a pipe); or the epitome of pop culture with Campbell’s tomato cans Andy Warhol. Let’s go back to the here and now and remember some truly surprising art market episodes. Forgive the eschatological nature of the matter, but another Italian artist, Piero Manzoniin the sixties of the last century he designed ninety cans into which he added thirty grams of his feces. He labeled the cans, five centimeters high by six and five centimeters in diameter, with the following words, in four languages in case they were not understood well: “Merda d’artista”, “Merde d’artiste”, “Artist’s shit” and “Künstelrscheibe”. In 2016, one of the cans was sold for an outrageous price: 275,000 euros. Manzoni had gotten his way. The prestigious Il Ponte auction house in Milan entered the game and a whole controversy arose: is anything fair in contemporary art? Is everything susceptible to being labeled as a work of art and sold?
© Getty ImagesLet’s look at a current example that, in its own way, is also revolutionizing the already hectic panorama: the (artistic?) works that come out of the different Artificial Intelligencel. If trying to make a living from art was already a chimera in many cases, currently it seems that art is destined to become what it was in its origins: a way of communicating the interior with the exterior without expecting any material reward in return: a personal lifeline that you have to cling to in order not to lose your way, but which you cannot expect to feed you. Now that paintings and graphic works made by Artificial Intelligence are incorporated into the art gallery and auction market, what is left for the mere mortal? At the beginning of this month of November, even the organizers of Sotheby’s were left speechless when they raised more than a million dollars from the sale of the work AI God, a tribute portrait to Alan Turingone of the fathers of computing, carried out by a robot that responds to the name of Ai-Da or, in private, that of Ada Lovelove (named in honor of a renowned English mathematician of the 19th century).
© Getty ImagesThe bidding had the same expectation and emotion as if the work had been created by a real artist, with feelings and hunger for success. The portrait of the mathematician, which occupied a canvas more than two meters high, at first seemed that it would not exceed the one hundred and sixty-seven thousand eurosbut twenty-seven people emerged who wanted, no matter what the cost, to take home the work of Ada Lovelace. In the end, the figure reached one million euros, an anonymous buyer took home the already famous portrait, and Sotheby’s released a statement to share that this auction had marked “a moment in the history of modern and contemporary art and reflects the growing intersection between technology of artificial intelligence and the global art market.
To the above, a piece of information for reflection. The painting sold was part of a series of fifteen paintings that Ada Lovelove created – if you allow the popular expression ‘like churros’ – in eight hours. That is, doing a quick mathematical calculation, this humanoid robot It took him thirty-two minutes to finish a portrait for which he paid more than a million dollars. ¿The art world has he gone crazy? It seems so…