Let's try to retrace a story that comes close to a paradox of contemporary art, provocation or rather the interpretation of a market that tries to surprise through events perfectly in line with Comedian, a real comedy about how you can pay over six million dollars for a banana that was paid thirty-five cents the day before at a fruit stand on the Upper East Side.
It was 2019, when Maurizio Cattelan he taped a banana to the wall of the booth Galerie Perrotin at Art Basel Miami Beach and called it Comedian. A banana with a concept of decay that is sold 5 years later for a surreal sum because we can't really talk about value even by the standards of the art world. Ironically, it was bought last November by the entrepreneur Chinese cryptocurrency Justin Sun, who not only promises to eat it but also to do it, and so he did by becoming himself the artist of the form of performance art. We must now ask ourselves what is happening in the art market, perhaps the rich want to participate actively and no longer as simple collectors?
For Justin Sun since he is the head of cryptocurrency (see our previous article) becoming a buyer of Comedian meant creating a spectacle between the world of art, the Internet and cryptocurrency. And rightly so, why should Cattelan's banana last? And if some people choose to spend millions on a banana, maybe the joke is on Sun. Maybe the joke is on all of us. Or maybe, it's not a joke at all?
We must also take into account that the returns on the art market have been stable or declining over the last ten years, so turning the spotlight back on can also be a strategy, but joking about it cannot always be a favorable model for a record recovery, given that for now the record has been a joke.
Cattelan himself admitted that the work is a satire of market speculation
Cattelan certainly comes out the winner, because Comedian makes fun of the art market by inviting us to rethink how this society assigns value to an object that is nothing more than a banana bought from a Bangladeshi fruit vendor named Shah Alam in a fruit stand on the Upper East Side of Manhattan near Central Park but also the headquarters of the Sotheby's auction house and who, to live in the Big Apple, sells dozens of bananas a day at 35 cents each.
What do a banana and cryptocurrency digital tokens have in common?
Generally, a work of art is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity that will accompany its value in the market. For Cattelan's banana, whoever buys it also receives this document, along with all the precise instructions on how to replace the "rotten" banana and which roll of adhesive tape. The parallel with digital tokens of cryptocurrencies is surprising, which derive their value exclusively from the collective contract and artificial scarcity. A billionaire of success in cryptocurrency and a street vendor in a satire of art market speculation, nothing more in a story studied at the table.
