December 15, 2024 05:00 IST
First published: 15 December 2024 05:00 Indian Time
When provocative artist Maurizio Cattelan first debuted his work Cattelan’s Comedians At Art Basel in 2019, the humble banana duct taped to the wall caused squeals of laughter and much hilarity all around. Kera’s artwork was recently sold at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million. (Perhaps it’s in keeping with this moment in history that a piece of gimmicky art was bought by a new-age cryptocurrency millionaire who proceeded to eat it, saying on stage that “the real value is the concept”.)
And indeed, it is. If art is born out of struggle with the hard facts of life, Cattelan’s Comedians Subversively raises some profound questions. How do objects acquire their value in the art market? Who decides? Many of us novices find the business of seeing and expressing beauty in artistic creation confusing. Why this and not that? On the one hand, there is the uneasy feeling of not being able to hide in a museum, and on the other, there is the lurking suspicion that all contemporary art may be a hoax drawn to us by a small circle of genealogies and genealogies. Privilege. As a commentary on the art world, Cattelan’s deliberate absurdity pokes fun at the insider crowd that pours millions for anything with snob value. Indeed, Cattelan presents himself as the living embodiment of Andy Warhol’s words, that is art you can get away with.
Part of the reason Cattelan’s Comedians It has become a media sensation because, in many ways, it is a clever metaphor for our times: a zero-effort piece with zero aesthetic value, a Kim Kardashian version of art, famous for being funny and expensive and nothing else. It reflects our post-truth world where style trumps substance and brings to mind the cynical Orwellian idea – that who controls the present controls the past. Still, it’s getting harder to reconcile the sporadic excesses of the lucky few golden lives with the images emerging from Gaza and Syria, where the barely existing ones are filled with uncertainty. Somewhere deep inside, red stars and greedy capitalists — influencers, reality TV stars, with their modest habits and silly talk — are starting to become deeply disillusioned. It’s no coincidence that the Oxford Word of the Year is “brain rot.” Which translates to the degradation of one’s intellectual state by over-consumption of mindless material. In a sense, “brain rot” is a dire warning to guard against misinformation and rewire our brains.
It takes time to build a pushback movement against accepted stupidity and injustice. Perhaps it will take a combination of bizarre circumstances like a $60 million banana, voice-deaf celebrity dialogue alongside massive visible inequality, and the shocking murder of a health insurance CEO to shake things up and effect change. Educated people of every social strata are openly and cheerfully proceeding to see that the millionaire owner has got what he deserves, which is why the innocent are forced to neglect to collect their own money. Can violence ever be justified? It is worth noting that the French Revolution ended feudalism by cutting off the entire aristocracy at once. As stories emerge that America’s CEOs are beefing up their personal security, they’re also thinking about Marie Antoinette.
Truth is not just stranger than fiction, sometimes they run parallel, together. The alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione, is reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s character Raskolnikov from his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment. A starving anti-hero living in penury brutally stabs a merciless pawnbroker, who mercilessly tortures his poor relatives and other debtors. Reserved and introverted, Raskolnikov, much like Mangion, had a contemptuous contempt for someone who respected profit while remaining indifferent to human tragedies. The reader cannot help but feel sympathy for the hopeless hero, as people feel for the young Mangione, whose shattering act has sparked a new debate on the nuances within “right” and “wrong.”
The writer is the director of Hatke Films
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