Today's award goes to a dubiously artistic "cryptocurrency entrepreneur". The BBC reports:
Maurizio Cattelan's provocative artwork of a banana duct-taped to a wall has fetched $6.2m (£4.9m) at Sotheby's in New York - four times higher than pre-sale estimates.
The auction house says Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun outbid six other rivals to get the "Comedian" installation of the Italian visual artist on Wednesday.
"In the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience," Mr Sun was quoted as saying.
The taped banana - now perhaps one of the most expensive fruits ever sold - was actually bought earlier in the day for a mere $0.35, according to the New York Times.
There's more at the link.
If eating a banana is a "unique artistic experience", then I daresay my next steak dinner is going to be a carnivorous Aztec ritual dismemberment! And as for paying over $6 million for it . . . words fail me.
How anyone can claim that a banana taped to a wall is "art", is utterly beyond me. It's like saying the scribbles on the wall by a three-year-old with a box of crayons is art, instead of meaningless disfigurement. What about a cabbage instead? Or a rutabaga? Or (shudder) arugula?
Oy gevalt . . .
Peter
16 comments:
Still better than kale...just sayin...
PT Barnum explained this long ago. A sucker truly is born every minute.
It looks like the California legislature...
I should be so lucky as to tape a banana to a wall and get even a hundred dollars for it...
It should be blatantly obviously by now that the entire "modern" "art" world is nothing but a giant money laundering scheme, whereby "art" that costs almost nothing and requires no talent to create is used as the vehicle for transferring millions in transactions that are "legitimate", since, after all, there is no accounting for "taste".
I'll take money laundering for five hundred, Alex
note that the banana is replaced every 7 days and the duck tape is replaced as it wears out (I don't know how many bananas it lasts)
I wonder how much the banana that was the payload on the Starship IFT6 test would go for?
I'll raise you one "artistic" soup can.
Remember this all about moving questionable sources of money around under the governments nose. Although I believe the government is part of the sham as well
Weimar consumerism - throwing money at the worthless because the world has no meaning. Sickness.
I'm not a big fan of arugula per se, but I like saying 'arugula'. It always brings a smile to my face.
Who cares about artistic. I'm thinking "salesman of the year" level achievement!
So once the banana is eaten or rots, does the new owner get to claim a casualty loss deduction on their taxes?
Exactly
IMO, Orson Scott Card was exactly right about the fine art world. He said it was a bunch of people who were very like the late Soviet Politboro: a gaggle of fools who mouthed the words of revolution but hadn't had a good, original idea since the 1920s. They spend too much time trying to impress jaded "art connoisseurs," and remind me of the tailors in the story "The Emperor's New Clothes."
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