The formula is as follows: media attention, festive environment and many millionaires eager to spend money. With these ingredients, the right dose, we have the perfect setting for any extravagance happen. For example, for an artist to stick a banana and copper for it $ 120,000. Or worse, someone to follow suit and buy it , or even another artist appears in search of their Warholian 15 minutes of fame, starting the very Warhol banana and coma with impunity only gives a performance made before the cameras. Although they look the mistakes of a bad comedy, this was what happened in the last edition of Art Basel Miami, the sunny branch of the prestigious exhibition of Swiss art, which, like all great art fairs, nothing suits them best that a crazy work likely to cause scandal and attract worldwide attention.
Maurizio Cattelan and his banana were the protagonists this year, but the truth is that for some time we have seen that every artistic event goes in search of its 15 minutes of scandal with some similar trick. Last year it was the auction house Sotheby's and Banksy who contributed to our banal memecracy with the partial and planned self-destruction of one of the graffiti artist's works. And before him, at ARCO, Wilfredo Prieto had caused a similar stir by exposing a glass of water and charging 20,000 euros for the chascarrillo. The more stupid, more media work. Or perhaps it is that if someone pays 32 euros to go to these events, the minimum is to see in the front row how a trilero plucks some unsuspecting.
To this there is also a formula: a banal object or vulgar and certainly cheap, exposed like a work worthy of reverence and offered at exorbitant prices exceeding any other piece, say, no fool. All this accompanied or wrapped in a speech spiced with the words "subvert" or "criticize", and some reference to the readymades of Duchamp. They come together and voilà : there is the controversial work of the year. Controversial because laughter or derisive snort skeptical that comes from common sense, usually afeados by the punctilious explanation of any connoisseur willing to show us that we, ignorant, we see a memez which turns out to have a rebuff refined the system. Jonathan Jones, for example, critic of The Guardian , justified Cattelan's work by ensuring that it was the "most disdainful comment about the art market that one can imagine." Is the same argument we heard from 1917 exploited the marginalized to criticize the operation (Santiago Sierra), banal art is to criticize the banality (Koons) circular silly and expensive works are to criticize the stupidities of the market (Cattelan ). Following that line of argument, he will end up saying that Trump builds walls to criticize the mistreatment of immigrants and that Torra writes racist articles to criticize racism. The truth is that this does not strain anymore . When you reproduce what is said to criticize, nothing is criticized. Firewood is added to the fire.
Well, someone may ask, what is the problem with a millionaire paying an absurd amount for an absurd work? It is your business. You may even do it knowing that the scandal will result in the valuation of your purchase. And yes, that is partially true. Remember me when Leonardo di Caprio pleased paid $ 400,000 for a painting of the Colombian Oscar Murillo, an astronomical price considering the work repeated gestures typical of expressionism and the result was little more than dirty wall. Well my countryman, I told myself. If someone is to benefit from the snobbery of a millionaire, how wonderful he is.
But since then I have warned that artists like Cattelan, who pass an occurrence through a criticism of the system, do not differ so much from politicians who pass a lie through a passport to paradise. What was the penultimate act of Boris Johnson campaign before winning the elections in the UK? A small perfomance . It was mounted on a tractor and crossed by a false wall precipitously polyethylene. She wore a message attached to the vehicle that said Get Brexit done, but also could bring a banana. An invisible bond united them: both Cattelan's work and Brexit are concepts that unleash controversy and in the end they serve a couple of rogues to get their way. Did not Johnson had lied to the regular accuse Europe to the size of bananas? He also used his fruit to criticize the system. The Art Basel, after all, maybe it was not a Warholian, but Johnsonian banana.
So the problem is not only with the millionaires but with all of us. ¿We like being deceived, being lied to, they put us, or the plantain- finger in your mouth? Do we celebrate the artist's deception and vote for the politician's little trick? Do cynicism and the aura of unraveled truhan seduce? Have we all become conceptual, longing for abstractions such as Brexit, Catalan independence or national greatness? Is that why they end up ruling leaders like Johnson, Trump or Torra, and forming artists like Cattelan, Koons or Hirst? Amid the contemporary cultural and political landscape no longer has more grace say that a ten year old could do this or that work of art. We know that a long time ago. The trouble is that now, after seeing the news, stuck my suspicion that that same child could rule a world power.
Jesters have come to politics with their banana under their arm. Embarked in radical processes, based on the fracture and the claim of identities, cultures and even races, they have managed to coax the great masses. Stupid art for billionaires, stupid politics for the people. Just look at what happened in Catalonia in the last two years. David Datuna, the artist who swallowed the banana impunity Cattelan, Catalan separatists managed to evade a sentence for rebellion mistaking the referendum for independence on 1 October with a performance. So collects sentence the judge Marchena. That was not an attempt to secede; that was a "decoy" with which the citizens were coaxed to mobilize and pressure the government to agree, now a legal referendum. Tremendous deception. Tremendous banana. And as if nothing. "I'll do," Torra said. And I'm sure Cattelan too.
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