The end of art?
November 26 2024
Video: Sotheby's
Posted by Bendor Grosvenor:
What is art? I prefer a broad definition; anything which, via our senses and imaginations, conveys meaning and emotion, but without relying on language. What is art made of? Traditionally we might say mainly painting and sculpture, to judge from the contents of our major art galleries. But probably for most of human existence it consisted of everyday objects which may have been incised or carved, like bones, rock and long-lost bits of wood. Nowadays, pretty much anything counts; Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Carl Andre’s bricks, Tracey Emin’s bed. And art can be as much an idea – a concept – as an object.
All of which is fine by me. People used to cry, ‘but is it art?’ when confronted by the latest genre-defying work, but we have moved on from that. I’m glad we think about art beyond the gallery. I’m glad too that we have (for the most part) stopped saying, ‘I could have done that!’ when faced with anything unconventional. As Damien Hirst once neatly replied, ‘but you didn’t.’ All creativity requires novelty, and if that involves sawing a cow in half, so be it. It is a Good Thing that over the last century the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of art have become so inclusive, even if the ‘why’ remains challenging, as it should. There can only be good art and bad art.
Or so I thought. Now, having seen the video (above) of Sotheby’s selling Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian for $6.2m, I wonder if we are stretching the boundaries too far. Have we debased art beyond repair, like a dictatorship printing money until it becomes worthless?
Comedian is a banana taped to a wall with gaffer tape. It was first seen at the Art Basel art fair in Miami Beach in 2019, where it immediately attracted worldwide media attention, before selling for $120,000. The buyer obviously didn’t get to keep the actual banana because it rots after a few days (though they did get the gaffer tape). What they really bought was the idea (insofar as it can be bought, Cattelan retains the copyright) and a ‘certificate of authenticity’.
When I first became aware of Comedian in 2019 I thought it was interesting, even if it was easy art for easy money, perfect for the online age and thus validated by the inevitable headlines and clicks. Probably, if a student had tried the same thing at an end of year show they would have scraped a pass. But we know that in the contemporary art world, context of display can be all-important, hence the trend for installations in grand, contrasting settings like historic houses. On the stands of Art Basel Miami, Cattelan’s challenge had a certain cheeky merit. As he explained in The Art Newspaper:
"To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value. At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules."
But Comedian’s afterlife, and especially its sale at Sotheby’s last week for $6.2m, seems to me to negate what Cattelan says. He isn’t playing within the system, or setting any rules. Comedian is instead a product of the system, and - we see now - was created to serve it. It doesn’t break any rules, it obediently follows them.
Let’s leave aside the fact that Comedian is not a particularly original concept (Sotheby’s say it ‘represents the apex of a hundred year-long, intellectual yet irreverent interrogation of contemporary art’s conceptual limits’ which began with Duchamp, but their use of ‘apex’ suggests that even they think it’s time to try something else). What I want to focus on is how Comedian fits into the way the art market - at its extreme end - creates, packages and monetises art. For there is a revealing line in Sotheby’s catalogue entry; ‘this work is number 2 from an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs’. Comedian was therefore conceived from the outset as a series (whether of three or three hundred is irrelevant) and thus a commodity.
Commodification is one of the cleverer tricks of the mega-money end of the modern art market. We see most clearly how it works in the market for Warhol prints; if a high, benchmark price is set for one Marilyn Monroe print, all other Marilyns become worth a similar amount. Auction has become the best place to establish this benchmark price, because it is set (or gives the appearance of being set) transparently, in real-time and by public acclamation. Consequently, the major auction houses have over the last two decades or so become essential players in creating and sustaining the modern and contemporary art markets. This is the system.
Then we come on to the broader question of how we judge the quality of a work of art, and thus eventually its value. What makes art ‘worth’ something in the first place? Art, being so often intrinsically worth nothing, can be bewilderingly subjective to value. Historians of art will know that our means of judging its value (both financial and cultural) have changed over time. In the 18th century there was a system of gatekeeping by fellow artists, as at the Royal Academy in London, where a select group decided which works were admitted, and which could be hung in the most prized spaces. Later, the voice of the art critic held great sway. Today, the role of the media, both legacy and social, has become more important, in part because attention and profile matter in a busy, globally connected world, but also because we live in an age of brands, the ultimate method of adding value to just about anything. Finally, there is the market, because the question of quality and value are now projected as being one and the same. Expensive art is good art. These are the new rules.
For Comedian, Sotheby’s gave an estimate of $1-$1.5m, implying an institutional belief that it (or rather, one of the three versions of it, like a kind of artistic holy trinity) was now worth about ten times what it made at Art Basel Miami in 2019. I don’t have a particular problem with this, for artworks can indeed climb steeply in value. But what is revealing is the extent to which Sotheby’s justified the significance of Comedian, and their estimate, by focusing on the press coverage it has generated since 2019. In the ‘Literature’ section of the catalogue entry (normally reserved for status-enhancing books and exhibition catalogues) we see almost entirely a list of news and website headlines, from the Wall Street Journal to the Daily Mail. As Sotheby’s says:
Literature
The below is a representative selection of the extensive ongoing media coverage of Comedian. Live coverage is ongoing, and further literature references are available on request.
Later in the catalogue entry, Sotheby’s explicitly links the online and media coverage to value:
“In a matter of days, Comedian had earned its status as a universally recognizable image and become folded into a legacy of propulsive masterworks that incited radical recalibrations for their time [...]. What visitors were so invested in – and what collectors had actually purchased – was not the literal banana and piece of tape, but rather a certificate of authenticity and instructions for installation.”
Comedian is far from the first work of art to court and gain notoriety. But it used not to be the case that notoriety was a literal barometer of artistic merit, and thus value. Our former ways of judging artistic merit were never perfect, but they were certainly more critical and more deeply held than clicks and headlines. For can we know what the clicks really reflect? Do people think Comedian really is the work “of pure genius” Sotheby’s tells us it is? I’m not persuaded they do, and this matters because ultimately we still need people to believe in the broader value of art, just as we ask them to believe that Comedian exists as an artistic concept (and even believe in the cryptocurrency which paid for it).
In other words, the subjective intangibility of art - especially in the modern era - requires us (by which I mean those of us in the art world) to maintain a degree of public confidence in it, and we damage that at our peril. Auction houses like Sotheby's, with their healthy commissions, must find it hard not to see works like Comedian as a chance to make more headlines and more money, and doubtless enjoy being part of the game themselves. But they need to be careful, and think of their wider responsibility to art. For many, the sale of Comedian for $6m, at a time of multiple, terrible wars, not to mention the gurning, toe-curling applause as the hammer came down, felt like a giant art market self-own, demonstrating a Marie Antoinette-like detachment from reality; ‘let them eat bananas’. Either way, it feels like art needs a revolution, and perhaps it has already begun, far away from the art fairs, auctions, collectors, curators and commentators.
Does any of this matter? I think it does, if only for this reason: art can be made of anything or nothing – a mere concept – but it must have a meaning. Usually that meaning is rooted in truth. A banana on a wall can reveal a profound truth about the art world and its market, but not if it is in fact designed to be part of, and benefit from, the market. That’s just hypocrisy. Comedian has purpose - to make money - but no meaning. Without the market, it is nothing. That’s why it must exist simultaneously as both concept and object (one of three), so that it can be given a value, and live on as a speculative financial construct. And if we agree that is art, then it is the end of art, isn’t it?
As ever on AHN, let us know what you think.
Update - an artist writes:
Having just read your article on the sale of the above a little while ago, I thought I'd take up your invitation to let you know what I think.
I think the sale of the work confirms, to many people, that the contemporary art world is a joke. The amount that it sold for confirms that it is a joke at their expense, perpetrated by a contemptuous elite.
I agree that art and invention have always gone hand-in-hand, but invention has always been just one element, not the main event. Artist's used to try to PLEASE the public, but since Duchamp, they simply TROLL the public for a response. This is why the level of response, measured in clicks and column inches, is now converted into charts as the principle indicator of financial value.
'What is the point of art?' is like asking what is the point of life? As a painter, I'm very conscious of the fact that historically, painters and artists have been living examples of a great life lesson; we take dust and we strive to turn it into treasure. When we succeed, we may also please the public but it is the act of striving which is the important part of the lesson, the result, the artwork is merely a reward for that striving, both for the artist and the public.
Making such art used to be difficult and time consuming. The public have always admired that about artists. But if your goal is just to troll the public for a response, then it has to be neither difficult nor time consuming and the result is what counts, not the life lesson.
Art fundamentally changed with Duchamp. His admirers like to refer to that moment as a great and wonderful revolution. For those of us who don't appreciate being the victims of trolls, it was the moment that art died. 'Comedian' is just the latest in a long list of successful trolls, with zero benefit to broader humanity.
