Collectors were seen choking on their fruit salads

Art is going bananas. Literally. Your average banana is now an objet d’art. Duct-taped to a wall and sold for over $6mn at Sotheby’s auction, it has the art world in a tizzy. Maurizio Cattelan’s work Comedian renders this humble fruit the showstopper if artworks were to catwalk. When the Italian artist first put this up at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, people were shocked. What you once mashed and diced, pulped and fried into chips had suddenly become a status symbol! A promotion that crowns plantains the king of produce – bananas are the apple of everyone’s eye.

The line between crazy and arty is thinner than an over-plucked eyebrow. Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture Fountain showcased a urinal; John Lennon was charmed by Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Painting, which involved a ladder, when they first met at the Indica Gallery in London. The sight of a banana at eye level tends to bring out strong likes and dislikes, not to mention debates about what really constitutes art. Is this a dig at labour exploitation and unfair trade? Is it lowbrow or high emotion? Art collectors were last seen choking on their fruit salads.

Apples and grapes have their place in ancient paintings, denoting as they do temptation and decadence, but bananas are usually seen in the hands of apes. All talk of its nutritional worth and lewd use in limericks may be in the past though. The feet of slapstick comedians who routinely slip on banana peels to get a laugh are frozen mid-air. Banana splits will henceforth be served with diamond cutlery. You can probably order banana bags and banana sofas online. Already available are banana lamps, made with perfect 3D scans, to light up dull evenings. The SpaceX test flight has opted for a sticker featuring a banana holding a smaller banana, keeping in mind the ‘banana for scale’ meme. Bananas are going places.

Whether satire, spoof, a political statement or the emperor’s new clothes, Cattelan has definitely kickstarted a kind of anti-art movement, an upside-downing of what’s usually considered high art. Food has long been art, but art as food? So, go out now, buy a banana from the fruit cart guy and tape it to the front door just before guests arrive. Eat it once they leave. Shh…can you hear Ecuador, the largest exporter of bananas, singing? It’s that song from Minions: Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-nana.



Linkedin


Disclaimer

This article is intended to bring a smile to your face. Any connection to events and characters in real life is coincidental.



END OF ARTICLE





Source link