When art sparks outrage.
Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.
“Yes! We Have No Bananas” was a monster hit—a chart-topper before the advent of charts—when it came out in 1923. A giddily nonsensical tune, the song begins, “There’s a fruit store on our street / It’s run by a Greek.” This Greek produce man—inspired by an actual fruit vendor on Long Island—answers every customer’s question with a “yes,” even when out of stock: “We have an old fashioned to-mah-to / A Long Island po-tah-to / But yes, we have no bananas / We have no bananas today.” Art, of course, resists interpretation. Frivolous and upbeat, the ditty captured the freewheeling spirit of the Roaring 20s; however, just a decade later, in the midst of a global economic crash, it was used as an anthem during the 1932 food shortages in Belfast.
Meaning is in the eye—or the ear—of the beholder. Price, however, is a different matter. We know what money can buy. Today, most bananas in the United States cost between 50¢ and 75¢ per pound. However, one particular banana, duct-taped to a wall by artist/art world provocateur Maurizio Cattelan and titled “The Comedian,” commanded a staggering $6.2 million at auction late last month.
Cattelan’s work has actively courted controversy for decades, whether depicting the Pope struck down by an errant asteroid or his functional gold toilet at the Guggenheim, cheekily titled “America.” However, the backlash to “The Comedian” has been a different breed.
When “The Comedian” debuted at Art Basel Miami in 2019, it was sold as an edition of three: two of the works went for $120,000 each and a third was anonymously purchased and donated to the Guggenheim (where one cannot help but see it, as the curators say, in dialogue with Cattelan’s gold toilet). The press kit put out by Galerie Perrotin, which brought “The Comedian” to Miami, emphasized that the work was ironic; that it referenced the banana’s role in slapstick entertainment as well as its status in capital markets (more on that in a bit); and that the banana itself would, naturally, need to be replaced every few days, as would the tape. “The Comedian” had its fair share of critics—and Instagram photo-ops—but the press around the work only truly ramped up when, citing a skipped breakfast, a visitor to an exhibition of Cattelan’s work at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art ripped it off the wall and ate it.
On the primary market, the media coverage of “The Comedian” garnered a giggle or perhaps an eye roll—at worst, mild to moderate confusion. On the secondary market, however, it bombed: not because of arguments over the work’s artistic merits, but because of a different controversy altogether. The initial New York Times coverage thought to give passing mention to the produce man—not Greek, but Bengladeshi—who sold the banana seen in the iteration of “The Comedian” on the block at Sotheby’s. A few days later, a second reporter decided to go back and interview Shah Alam, who had sold the piece of fruit in question for 35¢. Alam is a widower from Dhaka who used to work as a civil servant before uprooting himself to move to the States and be nearer his surviving family. He splits a basement apartment with five other men in the Bronx and, when the Times reporter informed him of the hammer price of the banana, he broke down and cried, saying, “I am a poor man…I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money.”
At this juncture, the story elicited what may be properly identified as the Three Stages of Internet Outrage: 1) a comments section choked with indignation; 2) voluminous posts across social media platforms; 3) multiple GoFundMe campaigns attempting to make things “right.” Cattelan, admittedly, did not help himself much in the article, writing the reporter, “Honestly, I feel fantastic…The auction has turned what began as a statement in Basel into an even more absurd global spectacle…In that way, the work becomes self-reflexive: The higher the price, the more it reinforces its original concept.”
Cattelan added that he was “deeply” moved by Alam’s tears, but that “art, by its nature, does not solve problems—if it did, it would be politics.” Some internet wags quipped that art which solves problems would, in fact, be design; others simply told the artist to go fuck himself. Many seemed to willfully ignore the part of the article which emphasized Cattelan saw none of the auction’s proceeds himself, as artists on the secondary market never do. But somehow, it seemed besides the point.
Like it or not, no one questions that “The Comedian” is art, as the mainstream art world and academia have come to define it. Cattelan is the inheritor of an artistic precedent set by Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), which was essentially a signed urinal. Whether or not one cares for a linear representation of art history, the notion that a simple daily object could constitute a work of art and, also, really piss off (pun intended) a wider audience is well over a century old. And, whatever outrage Duchamp’s readymade may have sparked in New York, that reaction still paled in comparison to the riot that Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” had provoked in Paris four years prior. It was, however, Duchamp who, in turn, paved the way for artists to incorporate this media furor into their own works, a legacy which, in addition to Catellan and many others, includes Andy Warhol and his own bananas.
The sad and sordid history of the banana itself is also nothing new. Nor is it new to me: my personal investment in the banana may be traced back to a book I co-authored with Johannah Herr in 2021. The Banana Republican Recipe Book elucidates how the CIA worked hand-in-glove with United Fruit (now known as Chiquita Brands) to effect regime change and keep Latin America friendly to US economic interests at catastrophic human and environmental cost. Most readers of Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez are familiar with the banana massacre, which happened nearly a century ago, in 1928. That shameful chapter has been repeated over and over in many Latin American countries, and also accounts for the strange phenomenon that, in New York City, an apple from nearby Dutchess County costs six times what a banana from, say, Ecuador or Honduras does. Similarly grotesque is the legacy of the pesticides that enable Ecuador and Honduras, countries two thousand miles apart, to grow the exact same banana.
Art, after all, trades in symbols, and whether or not Cattelan intended it, this freighted meaning of the banana is baked into “The Comedian,” as much as Charlie Chaplin’s comedic interventions with the fruit. A banana is something silly and light with a quite rotten underbelly. But why was the outrage around this banana so fresh?
This brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: the buyer. Rich people who make money in horrifying ways have spent their money on stupid shit since time immemorial, and indeed, a lot of that stupid shit has been art. Immediately after the auction, Cattelan’s billionaire collector went public with his purchase on X:
“I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve bought the banana 🍌!!! @SpaceX @Sothebys I am Justin Sun, and I’m excited to share that I have successfully acquired Maurizio Cattelan’s iconic work, Comedian for $6.2 million. This is not just an artwork; it 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. I am honored to be the proud owner of the banana 🍌and look forward to it sparking further inspiration and impact for art enthusiasts around the world.
Additionally, in the coming days, I will personally eat the banana 🍌as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture. Stay tuned!”
Keeping his word, he ate. Moreover, in taking pains to kiss the ring (or ass, depending on your politics) of Trump oligarch-crony Elon Musk by tagging SpaceX, Sun drew the scrutiny of reporters who noticed that he spent nearly $30 million of his own money in one of Trump’s crypto schemes.
For as tacky and crappy as I personally find crypto bro culture, I believe his purchase was incredibly apt for a crypto bro to have made. After all, cryptocurrency leverages the idea of fungibility into currency no longer tied to central banks or governments. The philosophical notion of fungibility was explored at length by Weimar Marxists and cultural theorists like Theodor Adorno, who wrote in Minima Moralia in a chapter titled “Auction”: “Unfettered technics eliminates luxury, not by declaring privilege as a human right, but by severing the possibility of fulfillment in the midst of raising general living standards…For in the middle of general fungibility, happiness clings without exception to what is not fungible.” As the world becomes increasingly commodified and the value assigned to goods collapses into their existence as data, the meaning of currency changes. Even art itself is a commodity that can be borrowed against. Indeed, why not get in on this pre-apocalyptic speculative action with a fun piece of fruit?
For many of us, I would argue the most honest answer is likely a sort of moral jolt: this sudden proximity between the astronomical cost of one banana and the very raw, real pain of a man who lost everything to move across the world and live closer to his kin, was just too much for us to bear. It was, I believe, a glitch in the code (or the “shock” that collage and montage can produce, according to another Weimar theorist, Walter Benjamin). The juxtaposition was too close for comfort and too suddenly presented to us to process it as business as usual, which it absolutely is. This drama niftily encapsulated the consumer dystopia we have all bought into and no one can afford to leave—and forced us to see it for what it is.
The question, then, is how do we simultaneously retain our humanity and our ability to use cultural tools to tell stories that matter, and keep ourselves sane? We must consider what is lost in this elision of meaning and worth. Goods and symbols will only continue to collapse into cold, hard, data-driven currency held at an ever greater distance from earthbound plebes too poor for the SpaceX shuttle ride. As they do, it only becomes more essential that we keep these stories of suffering alive enough in our brains to make better choices every day, and to be better to one another.
We used to look to art for this sort of thing. I hope we still do, even if Cattelan’s flippant comments make it clear that, like his buyer, he’s officially too rich to give a shit about the rest of us. Until we can figure out how to center the concerns of those whom this ravenous global economy preys upon instead of the Suns and Musks of the world, “The Comedian”’s joke is on us.
