What's the price of a banana? The answer will depend on the type of banana and where in the world it is sold. In the United States of America, it can be priced at $0.30. But in one's wildest imagination, never will a person come nowhere near the premium value put on a banana. In December, 2019, a banana was sold for $120,000 in Miami. This is no joke. A simple banana was elevated to an artwork when it was duct-taped to a wall, courtesy of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, of the international gallery Perrotin at Art Basel in Miami. The banana was also given the name "Comedian".
The story does not end here. A second version of the banana art was also sold for a similar price. But all this pales before what the banana's copycat, termed together conceptual artwork, fetched on Wednesday last at a Sotheby's auction. The banana this time fetched a whopping amount of $6.24 million. This is at a time when the art market is quite bearish. No fruit in the world has ever been sold at such an astounding price. To go by the art parlance, this is not even the original art. It is a copy of the original. The first duct-taped banana was funnily pulled off the wall and eaten by a performance artist. It ended up as it should have done. After all, Maurizio bought the banana from a bunch, the other potassium-enriched members of that cluster of fruits did not have the luck of selling at that astronomical price. In fact, Maurizio himself bought that select banana for $0.30.
Known also as a prankster, Maurizio has a habit of presenting outlandish objects as art. He had the uncanny perception of passing a gold toilet as art. The £4.8 million gold 'toilet sculpture' was stolen from Blenheim Palace in UK in 2019. Did Maurizio play a prank on the art collectors who spend sacks of money to collect artworks put on auction by Christie's, Sotheby's, Philips, Heritage etc; when he exhibited the duct-taped banana at Art Basel along with other expensive articles of art and craft? It could be a test of the kind of art appreciation on the part of all who love to be known as connoisseurs.
People in countries like Bangladesh with their empty stomachs will consider the entire exercise only sheer madness. They will object to the very idea of putting a banana up for showcasing as an object of art. It is, to most people the world over, craziness at its audacious height. A banana hung on the wall with a duct tape is rather a misplacement of a natural fruit meant for breakfast table. Well, a banana has even better use when a drained out tennis player eat a few crumbs from it in order to regain energy. The performance artist made good use of the original banana passed as an artwork at Art Basel.
Yet there is no problem agreeing with the fact that beauty or ugliness lies in the eyes of the beholder. Beauty or aesthetic value is never absolute, it is always relative. When it comes to the appreciation of abstract art, not many are familiar with the language and before one masterpiece they stand trying to figure out what makes it so famous! The common viewers value it because art connoisseurs have branded it something unique.
Still there are leap-year gaps between the level of artistic craftsmanship and the understanding of the art critic of the time, who are mainly responsible for deciding the market value of a given piece. The artist who had no luck in his lifetime to sell one of his paintings, because those received hardly any appreciation, has taken the ultimate revenge exposing the shortcomings of both art connoisseurs and critics. This is none other than Vincent Van Gogh whose paintings have broken records one after another for their prices in auction. Creative geniuses like writers, painters, sculptors are often far ahead of their time and those who stay light years ahead are subjected to total inattention. It is because they do not conform to the conventional types and patterns. To read, understand and appreciate them, there is a need for an altogether different set of lexicon.
Yet people in this part of the world will never recognise the art in a banana duct-taped on the wall. This is simply because it smacks of cheap populism based on ultramodern, sham and charlatan concepts ingrained in hollow people of the facebook era. Only those people who ignored Van Gogh so ruthlessly in his most creative period, pushing him to commit suicide can take the craziness to such an extent. The futility of this so-called banana art is further confirmed by the fact that the man of Chinese origin who bought it has made it explicit that he would eat the banana before it rots. For the upstart art lovers, this end of the banana is, however, not going to be a lesson. The next banana is waiting in the wing to replace it on the wall for exhibition and exposing the naivety and foolishness of the entire show.
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