Banana sold for $6 million

[Mandryka]

What is upseting is that he didn't see fit to auction that particular exemplar of the installation for a good cause. Given the publicity it's had, that's a lost opportunity.

[Madiel]

But, but...shouldn't the owner of such an important artwork be obliged to take a custodial attitude to it? So that it can be enjoyed and studied by future generations? Is the private owner or a Rembrandt allowed to just set it on fire if the mood strikes them?

(kidding, of course...I wouldnt care if anyone involved it this tired brand of clickbait shoved the banana up their arse. Or, better yet, had it shoved up their arse)

If you read the article, he maintained a suitably pretentious attitude towards the banana.

[Florestan]

Well, at least the food didn't go to waste!

K

It actually did, after digestion and defecation. The way of all art food...

[Spotted Horses]

I fail to see why anyone would get angry at the guy who made "art" by taping a banana to a wall. What makes me angry is that there are cyber currency people who are so obscenely wealthy as to spend more than $6 million to eat a banana at a press conference. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc, at least created useful products along the path of becoming obscenely wealthy. They weren't simply vampires that suck wealth out of the economy.

[SimonNZ]

This quite simply highlights that our notions of what it means to preserve and restore art is stuck in the nineteenth century.

We need a new generation of restorers who can return bananas to their original green/yellow, to be enjoyed by future art enthusiasts.

[Madiel]

This quite simply highlights that our notions of what it means to preserve and restore art is stuck in the nineteenth century.

We need a new generation of restorers who can return bananas to their original green/yellow, to be enjoyed by future art enthusiasts.

Well, industrial food production involves a lot of effort to keep things looking fresh while in storage for many months.

[LKB]

As I've posted previously, l like cheese. Therefore, I'm expecting to see some marvelously cheesy art in the news sometime soon, to be auctioned off for significantly more than that supremely boring banana. Hopefully with an appropriately interesting slice of ham.

[Mandryka]

As I've posted previously, l like cheese. Therefore, I'm expecting to see some marvelously cheesy art in the news sometime soon, to be auctioned off for significantly more than that supremely boring banana. Hopefully with an appropriately interesting slice of ham.

You need to check the Cavallaro Twiggy.

[SimonNZ]

Art Collector Who Bought a $6 Million Banana Offers to Buy 100,000 More

"A week after a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur bought an artwork composed of a fresh banana stuck to a wall with duct tape for $6.2 million at auction, the man, Justin Sun, announced a grand gesture on the social platform X. He said he planned on purchasing 100,000 bananas — or $25,000 worth of the produce — from the Manhattan stand where the original fruit was sold for 25 cents.

But at the stand at East 72nd Street and York Avenue, outside the Sotheby's auction house where the conceptual artwork was sold, the offer landed with a thud against the realities of a New York City street vendor's life.

It would cost thousands of dollars to procure that many bananas from a Bronx wholesale market, said Shah Alam, the 74-year-old employee from Bangladesh who sold the original banana used in "Comedian," an absurdist commentary on the art world by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. And it wouldn't be easy to transport that many bananas, which come in boxes of about 100.

And then there is the math: The net profit from the purchase of 100,000 bananas by Sun — who once bought a nonfungible token of a pet rock for more than $600,000 — would be about $6,000.

"There's not any profit in selling bananas," Alam said.

As an employee who makes $12 an hour during 12-hour shifts, Alam pointed out that any money would by rights go to the fruit stand's owner, not him.

"I am not personally familiar with the exact cost of the bananas," Sun wrote in a text message sent shortly after a stunt Friday where he ate the original banana during a news conference at a Hong Kong luxury hotel. "Through this event, we aim not only to support the fruit stand and Mr. Shah Alam but also to connect the artistic significance of the banana to everyone."

Reached by phone, the stand's owner, Mohammad R. Islam, 53, who goes by Rana, said he would split any profit between himself, Alam and the six other people he employs at his two fruit stands. No one had contacted him about any such purchase, though, he said.

Islam had learned from a reporter of Sun's plans, which included offering the bananas from Islam's stand worldwide, free to anyone who showed identification, according to his post on X.

There are other, quieter efforts to support the vendor. At least two online fundraisers have collected more than $20,000 for Alam.

Working in the rain on Thanksgiving Day, Islam's brother, Mohammad Alam Badsha (who is not related to Alam) said he would welcome the bulk purchase. But it would have little tangible impact, Badsha said, either on the daily life of the fruit vendors, or on the gulf laid bare by the $6.2 million banana and the stand that sold it for a quarter.

"It's definitely an inequality," Badsha said in Bengali.

He added a Bangladeshi idiom: It was, he said, the difference between heaven and hell."

[SimonNZ]

I'm very glad you brought this up --- thank you very much.

Prior to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan I watched a documentary about US teachers teaching Afghan pupils all kinds of topics. What really caught my attention was an American female art teacher explaining precisely the Duchamp urinal to a class of all-female young Afghans, some of them wearing the hijab. She launched into a typically left-liberal intellectual-cum-artistic mumbo-jumbo (samples above) which the Afghan girls obviously did not comprehend a single iota --- but from their facial expressions I could vividly sense how their incomprehension gradually but certainly turned into the uttermost disgust and horror as they obviously began to understand what the whole thing was about.

I know of no more damning indictment of the whole (falsely universalist) left-liberal worldview, of which the banana under question is a conspicuous instance.

By weird coincidence I saw that footage yesterday in Adam Curtis' documentary Bitter Lake, about the US alliance with Saudi Arabia beginning in 1945 and the long-term knock-on effect of inadvertently feeding the rise of fundamentalist  Wahhabism. And, yes, that scene was very cringey.

But I don't know how you think the banana thing is "left wing liberal". This is entirely of Gordon Gekko's world.

[Madiel]

The main artistic significance of the banana is to demonstrate the disconnect between the person who sold it and the person who bought it.

[SimonNZ]

The main artistic significance of the banana is to demonstrate the disconnect between the person who sold it and the person who bought it.

Reminded me of this: