taCity

In the annals of art history, Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian – a banana duct-taped to a wall – has always been an utter joke had tongue-in-cheek appeal. Its conceptual premise is simple yet vacuous: playfully critiquing the notion of art as an object of value. So, on 21^st Nov, in the year of our Lord 2024, when a Chinese crypto enthusiast, Justin Sun, acquired it at auction for $6.2m, the purchase peeled back new layers of chronic irony, revealing more about our cultural moment than perhaps even Cattelan intended.

Here’s the kicker: Sun didn’t purchase the banana or the duct tape at all. Indeed, the banana and tape aren’t actually the art piece at all. Like Theseus’ ship, the banana and the tape change depending on where ‘it’ is displayed. The banana that was on a wall in the Sotheby’s auction house was reported bought for 30 cents that morning.

What Sun paid the eye-wateringly stupid amount for was a certificate of authenticity; a piece of paper affirming their right to re-create the absurd display in their own home (or gallery, or bar, or in the metaverse). If this circus all sounds a bit familiar, it’s because it mirrors the mechanics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that were all the rage not that long ago: owning a claim to a digital or conceptual asset, rather than the thing itself.

The parallels between Comedian and NFTs hence are almost too perfect. NFTs thrive on the premise of ‘ownership without possession’ When you buy an NFT, you own the unique token that represents the asset, but not necessarily the underlying art, music, or video itself. Similarly, Comedian reduces art to its most basic components – a concept – and places value in the idea of ownership rather than the object itself. After all, a banana is perishable and will decay within a few days.

It’s no surprise, then, that a crypto enthusiast would find Comedian irresistible. Both NFTs and Cattelan’s work accelerate the traditional notions of what ownership, value, and authenticity mean in an age of late capitalism when everything under the sun is commodified. The buyer didn’t just buy art (arguably, there is no art here anyway); they bought into a narcissistic statement; a $6m edifice to their own warped ideology.

But here’s where the irony gets thicker than a carbon-belching blockchain ledger. Sun, the buyer, a staunch believer in the future of decentralized finance, purchased this conceptual piece of art using fiat currency. In theory, crypto enthusiasts advocate for a world where Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies supplant government-backed money. Fiat currency is, in their view, the relic of a bygone financial system plagued by inefficiencies and central control. Art works also have become a form of currency: the nefarious existence of freeports in various parts of the world have long been associated as ‘banks’ of very valuable pieces of art, where they are stored (tax free and away from a public that would presumably enjoy looking at them) as a form of asset, or currency for the owner.

So it’s rather quizzical when given the chance to buy one of the most conceptual – and commodified and indeed memeified – artworks of the 21st century, they reverted to fiat. Why? Perhaps it was a practical decision; Sotheby’s likely doesn’t accept crypto. But isn’t that just another layer of irony? If the future is decentralized, why participate in a legacy system to acquire an emblem of postmodern absurdity?

Comedian was always a critique of commodification (if a not particularly subtle one), and its buyer (perhaps deliberately?) reinforced this critique. Whether in art or crypto, commodification is inescapable. Cryptocurrencies, despite their promise of revolutionizing finance, are themselves commodities. They are speculated upon, traded, and hoarded, much like art. Even NFTs, hailed as the ultimate marriage of art and crypto, have largely become comical tools for speculation rather than radical decentralization. Their demise as a serious form of anything now evidences the utter injudiciousness of their creation; it would be hilarious if they didn’t have such a detrimental ecological impact.

By purchasing Comedian, Sun has highlighted the inescapable paradox of their own pernicious ideology. Crypto may promise to be the currency of the future, but it’s always going to be wedded to the same old systems of fiat finance that uses the state (and their ‘promise to pay’) as the ultimate backstop. In other words, it is precisely because the ideology that propels crypto – ponzi capitalism – demands the state be used as a support structure rather than anything to overcome.

Meanwhile, Comedian stands as a wry commentary on all of this: a banana taped to a wall that somehow holds up a mirror to the absurdities of art, finance, and culture.

Perhaps that’s it though. Cattelan’s work is as much about the buyer – Justin Sun – as it is about the art. The crypto enthusiast who purchased Comedian has become part of its performance, embodying the very contradictions it critiques. They’ve transformed a conceptual joke into a real-life parable about value, ownership, and the commodification of ideas.

And the rest of us? We’re the audience, chuckling at the thick yellow layers of irony as the banana ripens, reminding us that in the art world, and perhaps in life, it’s not the object that matters, but the story it tells.