Why a banana sold for $6.2 million
🍌 This banana emoji is not for sale
Issue #220: friends v. fans + the value of bad ideas
Maybe you’ve heard about the banana duct-taped to a wall that just sold for $6.2 million last month. Its name is “The Comedian” and its creator, Maurizio Cattelan, has built a career around art pranks. One of his previous hits, from 1999, is a sculpture of Pope John Paul II being struck by a meteorite.
The banana’s new owner, Justin Sun — a crypto exec — received neither a banana nor duct tape. Instead, he got a digital certificate that gives him permission to tape a banana to a wall and call it “The Comedian.” The certificate contains instructions for how exactly to tape the banana to his wall, and how to replace it when it rots.
Sun has a history of doing things like this: he once bid $4.6 million to have lunch with Warren Buffet (he won, but cancelled the lunch). Later, he bid $28 million to fly with Jeff Bezos into sub-orbital space on New Shepard. (He cancelled again! Sorry Jeff, scheduling conflict, can’t go to space today.)
I asked Christopher P Jones, an art historian who writes on Medium, for his take. Does all this — not the banana itself, but the stories we tell about it — constitute art? Jones’ rule for telling good art from bad art is to ask yourself whether its meaning converges on a set of possible options or broadens into a deeper set of possibilities. What you’re looking for are layers of meaning that continue to inspire new interpretations. Does a piece of art tell you what it wants you to think? If so, it’s not art — it’s propaganda.
Jones sees the duct-taped banana as continuing in a 100-year-old tradition of “found art” (everyday objects placed on pedestals) beginning with Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain and including Cattelan’s 2016 golden toilet. “If the banana artwork is a reflexive comment on the commodification of art,” Jones told me via email, “which I think is its purpose, then the absurdity — and therefore eloquence — multiplies with every sale, peel, bite, and news headline that reports on it.”
I’m curious what you think. Is this art or just PR? Something in between?
📚 Good quotes
- “If your beliefs are never challenged by your community, I have news for you: you don’t have friends, you have fans.” (Sochima M.)
- A follow-up to our issue about Bluesky, via one writer who became so addicted to Twitter he noticed himself developing a voice and persona specifically geared toward the platform’s dynamics: “Nobody has yet produced a successful alternative to Twitter because the things that people like about it are so hard to extricate from the things they don’t. The thrill of Twitter is the thrill of scale.” (Janis Hopkins)
- “Protect the ever-loving heck out of your ability to do — don’t let big ideas get in the way of that.” (Avi Siegel)
🧪 Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Even if you think an idea is bad, write it down. The more deeply you understand why an idea doesn’t work, the more likely you’ll come up with a good one next. (Chris Ferrie)
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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