Tag: Cultural Currency

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On modern wealth's bland aesthetics, the reopening of the Frick, and the meaning behind our Gilded Age nostalgia.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

In his recent New York Times article, “Beige is the Color of Money,” Guy Trebay explored the prevalence of muted palettes in the homes and playgrounds of the rich around the world, from St. Moritz to the Sun Valley. “In past eras,” Trebay writes, “the wealthy tended to attire themselves in the richest of colors: indigo, crimson, the purple of nobilities and kings. We are no longer in that era. These days, the hue preferred by the richest people on earth is that most bland and mousy of non-colors — beige.” Trebay argues this shift has come to the fore during a populist moment, as the “rich hunker down in khaki camouflage.” He posits that being clad in “the anodyne colors of baby food, tea cookies or screensavers: latte, oatmeal, cream, butterscotch, café au lait” signals the notion of wealth in reserve, not something to be flaunted before the frothing fury of the masses. Trebay quotes Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Ermenegildo Zegna, as saying, “The ultrawealthy don’t want to show off, and beige colors are good in that sense…This class of people is super discreet and doesn’t want to be seen.”

This is bullshit. Rather, I would argue, beige is a marker of how they want to be seen. And unsurprisingly, compared to its colorful predecessors, it’s a hell of a lot less interesting to look at. Aspirational wealth, now the color of barf, is especially barfy. Intriguingly, it also seems to have sparked a bit of unexpected nostalgia for when the rich spent their money on batshit, exhilarating displays of filthy lucre, rather than on a $30,000 Loro Piana cardigan that makes both the wool it is made of and the person wearing it look like a virgin.

After a five-year renovation, a temple of that sort of old-school, jewel-toned ostentation has reopened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the base of the Museum Mile: The Frick Collection. Ever since it reopened to the public on April 17, the museum has been so booked solid that the only way to get in on a given day is to cough up $90 for a membership. The line snaking around the block indicates this is no deterrent whatsoever. Boasting a hundred-foot-long gallery covered in the most sensual green velvet wallpaper the nation of France could produce, illuminated by a skylight that runs the entire length of the room, the Frick is the pinnacle of everything modern wealth is not. I confess I could lose an afternoon staring at its emerald walls alone, never mind the Corots, Turners, Goyas, and El Grecos that line them.

The Frick is a civilized place: There are no cameras or children allowed. Renovation aside, it is also a museum deliberately out of pace with the modern world. True to its namesake, Henry Clay Frick was a top-tier robber baron: coal and coke magnate, business partner to Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, union-buster extraordinaire. His taste reflects it. If money could buy it in 1906, his mansion on the prime corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue probably has it. A gargantuan Rembrandt self-portrait? Check! An entryway made of ten tons of Breccia Aurora Blue marble leading to an indoor fountain? Check! An Aeolian pipe organ? Check! Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More? Check! A Fragonard room and a Boucher room? Check, check! (Randy Baroque artists always travel best in pairs.)

Despite occupying such a rarefied niche, both tourists and locals continue to flock to the Frick in droves, celebrating the extraordinarily beautiful shit one rich person managed to buy and keep in his freakishly expensive piece of real estate. However, in our oligarch-besotted cultural moment, it does make me wonder why this is the kind of blue-blooded wealth we red-blooded Americans seem to be so nostalgic for.

For starters, the blood in America isn’t truly blue. For all one might say about Old New York Society—from Mrs. Astor’s ballroom to Edith Wharton—we can all agree old money isn’t so old on our side of the pond. No; the Frick, then, isn’t a temple of old wealth, but a bastion of what American rich used to be perceived as. Think of Scrooge McDuck back-stroking through his ducats; Daddy Warbucks tap-dancing; Mr. Potter scowling in his boardroom; Prince Akeem before his Randy Watson Brooklyn drag; or, most simply, Donald Trump himself, who, as Fran Lebowitz put it, “is a poor man’s idea of a rich man.”

One need not do a deep read of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to know that ever since a raggedy pack of religious extremists dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock in 1620, this country’s inhabitants have had some fucked up ideas about wealth. Notably, New England’s Calvinist pilgrims subscribed to the doctrine of predestination: they believed God knew from the jump whether you were going to heaven or to hell—free will and the quaint American myth of bootstraps be damned. The Pilgrims also believed that God showed favor by showering wealth and good fortune upon His “elect,” and that God’s elect demonstrated their status through a lifetime of righteousness and upstanding behavior. This has quite certainly set a tone that persists well into 2025: Americans are desperate people who have deluded themselves into thinking they can become respectable. And that, to us, means rich.

To this day, American “blue-bloods” claim descent from Mayflower stock, as did Henry Clay Frick. This tenuous—one might even say aspirational—connection is reflected in his art collection, and his proclivity for the Dutch masters, who painted the Calvinist aristocracy. The Mayflower itself was funded by Dutch Calvinists, the upper class of what was then the richest country in the world. Like the uber wealthy of today, the Calvinist elite showed their wealth in what they thought were subtle ways. They also did not not want to be seen. Rather, they wanted to be perceived as favored by God but in control of themselves—and, undoubtedly, of others (all that Bible study did little to put them off the slave trade). Like the Beige Hordes on the slopes of Courchevel today, they also preferred monotone—albeit darker hues. Simultaneously, they wore the richest fabrics, lace, and stonking pearls, all studiously catalogued in paintings eventually collected by the likes of Henry Clay Frick. Although scholarship speaks to the “restraint” in this era of fashion, I doubt a starving man in 17th-century Amsterdam would have perceived much holding back in the sumptuous, candlelit banquet tables groaning with all manner of fish, fowl, fruit, flower, crystal, and silver depicted in countless Dutch still lifes—and now hung on the Frick’s emerald green walls. Four hundred years later, I wonder if those glorious spreads were allowed to rot or wilt in the studio.

Curiously, given the beige miasma, much ink has also been spilled about the “New Gilded Age,” and how big, loud 80s bling is back—supply-side shoulder pads and caviar. At first blush, this may seem like a contradiction, but one must remember it's a nerd version of such bling of yore, a taste memorably summed up in Rebecca Shaw’s Guardian headline, “I Knew One Day I’d Have to Watch Powerful Men Burn the World Down, I Just Didn’t Expect Them to Be Such Losers.” Yes, Zuck got his MAGA makeover and is sporting chains and Balenciaga—so much for the de rigueur Prius and Uniqlo hoodie from HBO's Silicon Valley. But Zuck’s Maui Ewok-chic hideaway has nothing on Henry Clay Frick's Fifth Avenue digs, and offers nothing new to wealth’s aesthetics but cheap imitation. Henry Clay Frick brought Old World Wealth over to the New to demonstrate his own preeminence. Grandeur and history were entirely the point. For Zuck and his billionaire brethren, there largely isn’t one.

In an interview with comedian Dan Rosen for his Middlebrow podcast, “cyberethnographer” Ruby Thelot discussed why he believes the tech elite don't collect art: “A lot of my friends in tech in SF, besides maybe video games, are not interested in being an audience to culture that is not about them…When I am in front of the painting over there…I need to accept that I am not the center of the activity. I need to understand something else, right? I’m not optimizing myself. When you run you can beat your time. Either I like the painting or I don’t like the painting. There isn’t a clear metric around it.” Of course, Henry Clay Frick is at the center of his art, as long as his museum-mansion bears his name: he bought it and, because of his immense wealth, we get to see it all in one place. (Tellingly, his favorite painting he bought was said to be Goya’s “The Forge” which depicted the metalworking that made him a rich man.) But the Beige Bros lack the ability to see it this way, or with any nuance. Similarly, this framework also explains why the splashiest art commission Zuck has made was a seven-foot sculpture of his wife, a monstrosity brought into this world by Daniel Arsham, famed for luxury brand collaborations and toy cars.

In the same interview, Thelot talks about how the culture is poorer when an audience for the arts is not cultivated from a young age and the world is run by engineers who live to work and order food to their desks on DoorDash. He implies that the striving goals of such a class of workers are simply optimization of the mind, the body, and, of course, the bank account. He sees it as a “tragedy” that they cannot tell a Monet apart from a Manet. He pins the blame on the death of liberal arts education and core curriculums.

Whatever the cause, today’s drip simply isn’t the same. The Old Masters art market has crashed. Dead is the notion of owning old, expensive booty from empires of yore that require knowledge of craft and scholarship to appreciate. The Frick is a jaw-dropping floorshow of exactly that, and a testament to its staying power when compared to the bling of today. After all, what would a Tech Bro museum look like? Would it have its own crypto currency? Would it boast a ketamine-fueled gala on the playa at Burning Man? Or would it simply be a subtly textured, puckered ecru circle of hell underneath Satan’s frozen asshole in the Divine Comedy? (Full disclosure, that is exactly how I imagine the playa at Burning Man.)

Anyone with a smartphone is treated to breathless news coverage of the rich: lavish events and vacations and jewels. But before rockets and megayachts (and make no mistake, Henry Clay Frick owned a steamship and the 19th-century equivalent of a rocket: a private rail car), the rich collected the booty handed down (read: stolen) from one empire to the newly ascendant one. They valued provenance, because they believed it placed them squarely in its lineage. It became their own heritage, like the family trees we Americans are so short on. To own a Roman mosaic or bust was to embody a bit of Caesar. This narrative of empire is today the backbone of most major museums, a correlation that is a pet topic of mine. It is also exactly why the Frick feels so familiar and so august: it’s like a mini museum in which one God-fearing, union-busting man lived, an experience we can microdose ourselves by walking through it.

Of course, the art of the rich still crowds the walls of museums. Just as surely, that art reflects the power of certain dealers, just as it always has. Joseph Duveen, who famously said, "Europe had a great deal of art, and America had a great deal of money," was the famed dealer to the robber barons in the Gilded Age. He maintained four separate accounts for Henry Clay Frick alone. In New York City right now, four major museum retrospectives feature contemporary artists represented by a single blue-chip gallery, Hauser and Wirth. The rich and their servants still do a great deal to shape our notions of culture and refinement. But that 19th-century robber baron wealth is what built US museums and spread the seductive, Calvinist lie that a world where the rich were stewards of nice things was a world where the rich maybe deserved to have those nice things. Sometimes, the rich even shared them with the plebes, usually after they died out of noblesse oblige, or simply hating their kids.

Nostalgia for the Gilded Age is nostalgia for a world order that perhaps kept us down, but at least made a little bit of sense (if you squinted hard enough at the Dutch still life). Today, we have Kaws at every art fair and Katy Perry dismayingly back from space in one piece. TikTok is rife with alleged “home improvements” that destroy historic homes in pursuit of a Kardashian aesthetic that somehow manages to be both spare and maximalist. Rebecca Shaw was right: today’s rich are cringe. Beige, however, is not a matter of seeking inconspicuousness; it is a part of the cultural poverty that plagues our ruling class, whose libraries go no further than A for Ayn Rand. Beige is the color of a desert of ideas, as well as what the earth will look like once the billionaire class has destroyed it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or not one considers the hue ostentatious. Mark Twain, who coined the term “Gilded Age,” once wrote, “The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.” After all, it also doesn’t matter what someone is wearing when you’re under their boot. But that won’t stop me from renewing my Frick membership (or—full disclosure—borrowing my mom’s).

[post_title] => Robber Barons vs. Beige Bros [post_excerpt] => On the reopening of the Frick, modern wealth's bland aesthetics, and the meaning behind our Gilded Age nostalgia. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => frick-collection-reopening-new-york-museum-gallery-art-beige-wealth-aesthetics-calvinists [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-16 06:23:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-16 06:23:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8570 [menu_order] => 16 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 28, 2025September 16, 2025

Robber Barons vs. Beige Bros

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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The real price of admission for Julie Mehretu’s Subprime Mortgage Mural.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

A very distressing thing happened recently: I agreed with Steve Bannon. In a recent interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat (more distressing still: being at such a loss about our hellscape slide into dictatorship that I voluntarily listened to Ross Douthat), Bannon said, “The financial crisis of 2008 brought on by the established order…is one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of this country.” By most estimates, over 8 million jobs were lost, and unemployment in the United States more than doubled. When the housing bubble burst, 3.1 million Americans filed for foreclosure—or one in every 54 homes. Meanwhile, the banks that helped perpetrate the crisis profited handsomely, as they successfully gambled on the country’s housing market collapse. This titanic feat of moral turpitude and greed was dissected by Michael Lewis in his book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, later made into a film. “None of the crooks or the criminals that did this were ever held accountable,” Bannon insisted, and, yes, I agree. ”None of the elites in this country were ever held accountable for it.”

The elites who benefited weren’t just bankers, either. In the midst of that crisis, artist Julie Mehretu received a $5 million commission from Goldman Sachs to dominate its headquarters’ lobby in Lower Manhattan. Goldman, of course, was one of the banks most embroiled in the Subprime Mortgage Crash—and by accepting its money, Mehretu indirectly became embroiled in it, too. Completed in 2009, the commission, titled “Mural,” was described by Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker in 2010 as “[h]undreds of precisely defined abstract shapes in saturated colors—small dots and squares, straight and curving lines, larger geometric or free-form shapes ranging from several inches to several feet in length—[moving] across [the wall] in an oceanic sweep.”

For the sake of clarity and precision, this article will henceforth refer to the work as the Subprime Mortgage Mural. And while at the time it was unveiled, Tompkins alluded to a touch of hand-wringing, he very quickly exonerated the artist for accepting Goldman’s money:

"Financial institutions have been taking a lot of hits lately for their role in precipitating the fiscal crisis. The behavior of Goldman Sachs, in particular, has infuriated nearly everybody, from Congress and the Federal Reserve to the New York Times editorial board and Rolling Stone, which described the firm as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’…None of this was in the air in 2007, though, when Goldman commissioned Mehretu to do the painting."

For the record, the crisis definitively started in August, 2007. But regardless, Tompkins further exonerates Mehretu by claiming that, allegedly, most of the money didn’t end up in her pocket: “The firm paid five million dollars for ‘Mural,’ about eighty per cent of which went into fabrication costs (including salaries for up to thirty studio assistants) during the two years she spent working on it.” (I would love to see a budgetary breakdown of these expenses given what I know of the lives of my peers who work in the arts and in fabrication, but alas.)

Mehretu has been back in the news as of late—this time not for accepting a large sum of blood money, but for spending it. Last autumn, it was announced she had dropped a $2 million donation to the Whitney to ensure anyone under 25 would have free admission. On the face of it, this was a lovely gesture. However, it begged the question: If the end goal was to make the museum more accessible to all, regardless of income, why was that inclusion sponsored by someone who could only afford to pay for it as a result of perhaps the most violent shift of capital and wealth redistribution in our lifetimes?

It wasn’t the first time the museum had accepted this kind of money, either indirectly (through donors like Mehretu) or directly (the Whitney is also sponsored by Goldman and Bank of America and many other fiscal institutions). But if homeownership is the main means of creating generational wealth in this country—wealth that BIPOC have been historically and repeatedly shut out of in the United States—it should feel especially troubling when a cultural institution is being funded by the banks most responsible for why so many people can’t afford the price of admission in the first place.

This problem isn’t uniquely American. Whilst grappling with its own quaint connection to empire and looting, the British Museum is also struggling to make the museum free for all…whilst taking money from British Petroleum to achieve it. France and Italy, though historically proud of their august, state-sponsored cultural institutions, are increasingly taking large-scale cultural funding from the private sector, including fashion conglomerates such as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Kering. Those two companies largely underwrote the recent restoration of Notre Dame.

But in the United States, museums have always leaned more heavily on private funding, and the government has for decades aggressively policed cultural institutions' values and slashed budgets accordingly—long before DOGE was even a glimmer in Elon Musk’s eye. For these reasons, the situation here arguably feels most dire. Mehretu’s donation is just the latest iteration of a fundamental problem with how we fund the arts. It was just a couple of years ago that photographer Nan Goldin dragged her protest against the Sacklers, who funded an entire wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art among many other projects, all the way to Oscars season in Laura Poitras’ harrowing documentary about the opioid epidemic, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The family name was subsequently removed from the Met. (However, the David H. Koch Plaza remains out front.)

Yes, ghastly people have been patrons of expensive art throughout history. But they did so, in many if not most cases, to trumpet their own glory and paint what we might call the victor’s narrative. Then, as today, we need to ask who is letting us in the door and what they want us to see and why. If we continue to let such people and corporations fund publicly accessible art in the United States—which could charitably be called an endangered democracy—what stories will our cultural institutions tell? What values will they have? If we are having this conversation around painkillers and petroleum, then it is essential that we have it about banks, too.

Let us begin with the Subprime Mortgage Mural itself. In that same New Yorker piece, aptly titled “Big Art, Big Money,” Tompkins describes the Subprime Mortgage Mural thusly: “There are four layers of markings in ‘Mural,’ and many of them implicitly refer to the history of finance capitalism—maps, trade routes, population shifts, financial institutions, the growth of cities.”

However, you almost definitely wouldn’t be able to identify any of this when looking at it. This is work that is, in a word, corporate—as is much, if not all, of Mehretu’s work. It won’t inspire the security guards to discover class consciousness when they clock in. It won’t drive the bankers to jump off the ledge in shame (not that the windows open wide enough). Mehretu’s work is slick: so slippery that meaning slips away, elusive as that subprime lending rate or 20th-century retirement plan. It is as vague as the name of a new miracle drug: No one knows how it works, only that it costs a shitload of money.

And, lest you doubt my judgment on this, or Tompkins’, or the fact that Mehretu took $5 million from Goldman right after the fucking Subprime Mortgage Crash (did she ever stop and wonder…too soon?), American Express also entrusted Mehretu to “re-imagine” teeny-weenie murals on limited edition Amex Platinum cards in 2021, a collaboration dressed up as a “sponsorship” of the Studio Museum in Harlem. It is hard to imagine how anodyne art must be to literally grace the front of a credit card, but one has to hand it to Mehretu: She is a very canny capitalist at any scale. Her work thrives on institutional affiliation.

Indeed, what does it mean to be a corporate darling of an artist? What does it mean to take such ill-gotten gains and produce what purports to be social commentary? After all, Mehretu’s stated aim is to marry political commentary and landscape art. In a talk with Art21, titled “Politicized Landscapes,” she said, “The abolitionist movement, the Civil War, the move towards emancipation, all of these social dynamics that are a part of that narrative we don't really talk about in regards to American landscape painting. And so what does it mean to paint a landscape and try and be an artist in this political moment?"

In this regard, Mehretu’s success has everything to do with the kind of identity politics this country and its art world cannot shake. Her background boasts what might be called a DEI hat trick: Ethiopian, Jewish, lesbian. Accordingly, it features front and center in most press about her, including Tompkins’ standard visitation in his New Yorker profile. This is hardly Sydney Sweeney taking commercial work because acting simply doesn’t pay her bills. This is also not Diego Rivera trying to take Rockefeller money to sing a love song to the USSR. No, it is actually something more sinister: an artist who is playing with notions of network and inclusion and accessibility while pocketing the dirtiest money in the land.

Cosmetics, of course, is essential to the politics of the Subprime Mortgage Mural and the Whitney donation it enabled. And Mehretu poses an especially illustrative case of the ethical dilemmas incurred by funding a museum with private sector money. This is because the optics of her donation involved not merely her art, but also her own biography. The Whitney has courted its own fair share of controversy around such treacherous PR terrain, from a curatorial scandal around a painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Biennial and a board member’s ties to tear gas to accusations of union-busting and exquisitely ham-handed social media that gets no love in the comments section. Perhaps it's no surprise that a museum named after a robber baron is slow to realize it has to cover its woke bases.

Unsurprisingly, articles about Mehretu tend to spill a fair amount of ink on her identity, as does the Whitney’s artist biography of her. However, I would wager that you wouldn’t be able to guess one goddamn thing about her if you looked at her paintings. Yet, she insists they are political. In a Guardian profile titled, “Julie Mehretu paints chaos with chaos – from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park,” Mehretu says of her process of creating a large-scale abstract work about the uprising in Egypt, “I don’t ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that, I was in here working on New York, and I’m drawing, and this thing is unfolding: I have al-Jazeera on the computer livestream, I’m paying attention to NPR…So I was looking architecturally at New York, and then suddenly I’m back in Africa. And then the painting grows through drawing after drawing, layer after layer.”

Looking at the piece one wonders: Is it insidious? Is it beneficent? It is the upholstery on my Aunt Sarah’s couch and curtains in her high-rise on Yellowstone Boulevard in Queens? Shapes skip and scamper about, lines zig and zag, maybe to evoke a network of some kind. There is color, pop, crackle, lacquer. There is balance, there is motion, there is form. There is sinew, texture, chaos almost threatening to find order and just the reverse: a hint of breakdown and frenzy. This is probably the most compelling aspect of the work to my eye, but also a damning endorsement of stasis: No matter which way you view it (a wave good-bye or hello to a world order), flux is the norm. Change is a threat never realized, reduced to a flat trophy on an enormous wall. The work is fundamentally corporate in that, it’s decorative and, upon viewing it, mostly you will glean that it is a megalithic mural that occupies VERY expensive real estate. That is what matters most to corporate art, ultimately: The placement is where it derives its power. In this light, it’s ironic if not hilarious that Mehretu often claims to reference the Occupy Wall Street movement, including in her Guardian interview. She has, if nothing else, come to occupy Wall Street.

The Whitney’s website states, “Mehretu’s work does not represent specific locations but rather takes up the radical possibilities of abstraction.” In fact, it does just the opposite. Her work proves exactly why Abstract Expressionism was the US state-sponsored school of painting during the Cold War: You can project anything onto it at all. This is also why Mehretu’s art succeeds in a corporate space. Absolutely no one wonders what a Soviet Socialist Realist painting is about. But you can look at a Jackson Pollock or a Julie Mehretu, scratch your academician goatee, and mutter something fatuous about velocity or uprisings or commerce or democracy, or whatever other bullshit is handy to spew at the uninitiated. Better yet, such jargon can be used to gatekeep art from those deemed not elite enough to understand it. The ambiguity becomes a cudgel.

Is Mehretu’s identity or community conveyed in her paintings in any meaningful or discernible way? Her work is often quite beautiful and inarguably well made. And art, of course, doesn’t have to say anything about politics at all. However, if you are going to spew political opinions, as she did for the Guardian or for her show at the Whitney in 2021, maybe don’t take that Goldman money when all those dreams of home ownership and generational wealth are barely cold in the ground. One cannot speak truth to power when one is on power’s payroll. In that sense, truthfully, it doesn’t matter what Julie Mehretu looks like or to whom she is married: She has still been bought.

Much has been made recently of how our so-called Culture Wars have distracted from a more obvious Class War. America is famously allergic to the idea of class, even if it’s as endemic and obvious as our obsession with faith, all while we claim to be secular. Last month, Laverne Cox spoke incisively of how America likes to scapegoat trans people, who make up less than 1% of our population, while billionaires, who also constitute 1% of our population, are actually the source of our woes. Indeed, just how badly have we all been played when Laverne Cox and Steve Bannon can agree on something?

As both museum patrons and people, we deserve public art and institutions that are better than the identity politics pushed by those who do nothing but take the money and run—only to pay lip service to inclusivity during New Yorker interviews. But the same political class of billionaires that has bought both political parties has also bought all of our cultural institutions. The big donors are the same on every wall and at every gala. If this tautological clusterfuck feels familiar, it should come as no surprise that Mehretu is one of the Obamas’ favorite artists. Of course the Democrats have that special distinction of believing the lie that they, too, can take billionaire money but somehow represent the marginalized. In reality, they are spineless whores bought by the same tax evaders as the Republicans—and the Whitney—just less honest about it. Mehretu is tellingly on Obama’s walls and on Amex cards alike—much like the Democratic party is enamored of the image of politics while taking objectively filthy money. Representation and promises of accessibility feel pretty hollow when they are sponsored by the same people who screwed millions of Americans out of their homes. This is a form of representation that is optics and optics only when people’s actual lives are getting crushed by a larcenous economy.

Sure, art does not have to be explicitly political to be good, but this art in particular is looking an awful lot like the worst of neoliberal politics right now: girl-boss abstraction about commerce that took subprime lending crisis blood money from Goldman and gave it back to the Whitney as penance. Mehretu’s art and the economy surrounding it encapsulate how identity politics have been cynically manipulated by big money on the alleged left, which isn’t left at all: It is money serving money, which is all money will ever serve. It is art about ignoring the little people. It is art for a media landscape that has no idea what the hell anyone in this country is thinking and cannot predict a single fucking election. It is art that restates the obvious opaquely and with no particular flair, like Pete Buttigieg explaining why all the planes are falling out of the sky on MSNBC. It is art that has the gall to reframe a whole lot of nothing as something beneficial, when all it does is launder the money and decorate the walls of the very, very rich, while lying about inclusivity to the poor. In short, it is art that confirms this sinking feeling that we’ve all been had by some great circle jerk every time oil execs, technocrats, bankers, and other swindlers hold open the museum doors for us: Have a little culture! As a treat! And it’s another reminder that, like our political institutions, we need our cultural institutions to represent something other than big donors who preach inclusion while robbing us blind.

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March 11, 2025July 10, 2025

Free Entry, but at What Cost?

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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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.

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December 6, 2024December 6, 2024

What Could One Banana Cost?

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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