At the 2019 Art Basel in Miami, the artist Maurizio Cattelan produced and sold a piece of art aptly titled Comedian for $120,000. The piece, pictured below, was an actual banana affixed to the wall with duct tape, along with a certificate of authenticity and replacement instructions.
What could possibly make a banana taped to the wall worth $120,000, more than my first house? The immediate impulse is to discredit the piece, and I suppose the buyer as well, by asserting that it has no utility or aesthetic value and could be effortlessly reproduced by a child. But that’s to misunderstand the value of art.
I find art easiest to think about by first focusing on literature (or theater or film). For example, we almost daily read about war and the numbers of people killed or otherwise affected. But as a one time seventh grader, the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, conveyed to me the very real, visceral experience of war. A truth otherwise inaccessible to myself and others who haven’t lived it. The same is true for so many of life’s deeper truths: love, heartache, triumph, etc. And so, art is a very particular method of communication. One that can bypass our rational minds to convey deeper, more heartfelt truths.
It’s humorous that the particular point that Cattelan was making with Comedian was to satirize the market for art, and I suppose markets in general. He invites the viewer to consider the absurdity of a piece of art being worth so much more than the exact same object when not presented as art. And I fear he does have a point. In Economics, we assert that the value of an object, art or otherwise, is best proxied by what a buyer is willing to pay for that object. And for THAT buyer, I suppose this is true. They were free to spend that money on other things, but chose not to. But this same logic doesn’t hold when speaking of relative values across a society. Market value reflects not only relative preference, but also ability to pay. And so a wealthy collector deciding a piece of art is worth more than a modest home doesn’t necessarily make it so, a lesson driven home quite effectively by Cattelan.