Crash! Glass breaks and a figure falls from a skyscraper. We will find out how and why in later pages, but we will know that his name is the Comedian and that it is he and not Rorschach who is the protagonist of the ‘Watchmen’ story, a challenging and uncomfortable figure – and also something more than that. – which at the same time is the most lucid and the one that best identifies and interprets the sign of the times, in its case, bitter and cruel. Beyond the fourth wall the following happens: news travels around the world in 2019, an artist has exhibited a work consisting of a banana stuck to a white wall with adhesive tape during Art Basel Miami, the global epicenter of the art market, and therefore If that were not enough, then a ‘performer’ appeared, took it off and ate it. The original work is titled ‘Comedian’, and is an idea by Maurizio Cattelan.Related news standard Yes Dataland, the first museum for art IA, a work by Refik Anadol Eduardo Almiñana standard No INTERNET Hats in ‘Black and White’, the BYN Eduardo Almiñanaa’s last trip, the second, the intervention, ‘Hungry Artist’, by the Georgian David Datuna (who by the way passed away in 2022 making much less noise that with its iconic action; so little, that almost no one has found out and even its Wikipedia page mentions the scant coverage of its last event). The comedian banana, however, like Moore and Gibbons’ character, is more an echo, a wave, than a relatively static body: its reverberation remains bouncing off gallery walls, collectors’ homes, television channel sets, smartphone screens, meme frames, online games and people who talk about what art is. and it is not. The banana is a symbol of what had to come: the important thing is not so much the fruit as what certifies that the installation is a work of art and has a price and owners. On a planetary scaleOf course, this dynamic is not something new, but it was definitely going to evolve into an artistic-commercial explosion on a planetary scale with the rise of the NFT as a format; and we say ‘boom’ and not ‘boom and bust’ because one thing is what we believe happens in our bubble-generating euphoria, and another is what actually happens: the NFT existed before the collective madness, during, and later, right now, as useful and functional in different fields as it was when the vast majority surrendered to its acronym with religious devotion. Almost anything is susceptible to becoming a bubble if we propose it – or those who can induce us to propose it –: from tulips to cartoon-style simian avatars. ‘Comedian’, by Maurizio Cattelan, is sold at Sotheby’s New York for $6.2 million ABCThe interesting thing about all this, a lesson we can learn, is how the loss of importance of the material that conceptual art entails goes hand in hand with the The very nature of digital art, which despite the comings and goings of the traditionally conservative art markets – especially in turbulent times – continues its path as an artistic expression typical of a time in which we inhabit woven virtual spaces for much of the day. with ones and zeros. The physical reality of digital art that, to cite an example, is projected, is very different from that of a painting or sculpture. Made from light, from photons that by definition travel through space at such a speed that they have nothing to invest in the axis of time – photons, if they could experience, would not experience time: for them the departure and arrival would occur in parallel. simultaneously – these immaterial pieces of art are, when you think about it, incredibly fascinating. We could project them into space to travel for thousands of years, or much longer than that, being free of the heavy burden of materiality. Justin Sun, latest buyer of ‘Comedian’ ABCThe banana, of course, does have a material aspect: it itself and its fermentation expiration that requires it to be replaced every week, the adhesive tape and the space in which it is installed. Digital art also depends on electronic media where it is created, stored or displayed. But there is a link between the one and the other that has opened the floodgates of the dam and made the trend flow again. So much so that Cattelan’s banana returned to the covers of media around the world last November after having been sold at Sotheby’s New York for no more and no less than 6.2 million dollars (the first three were sold for prices ranging from 120,000 to 150,000 dollars) to the Chinese cryptocurrency businessman Justin Sun, founder of the TRON platform and eccentric guru who was happy to have acquired a work that in His opinion unites art, memes and cryptocurrencies, and as soon as he promises to support Greta Thunberg in her fight to raise awareness in the world about the climate crisis with a million dollars, as he declares himself a fervent follower of Donald Trump or announces that he will give away the banana of Cattelan to Elon Musk to support SpaceX. And so the banana ‘yira’, ‘yira’, and a dramatic laugh continues to be heard as it passes.
#Digital #bananas
