an essay about art and fruit
I'm lying in bed, cat on my hip, too hepped up on kratom to sleep, thinking about Yoko Ono and conceptual art. In particular, that piece with the hammer where you can pound a nail into a board. Something about roles or power dynamics. Or collectivism or procedure. Possibly Jesus.
There's that story about how John Lennon met Yoko Ono at a gallery. She wanted to charge him five shillings to hammer a nail and he said something about hammering an imaginary nail for an imaginary five shillings. It cost him his marriage. Jokes in the art world are expensive.
And the cat just left. I'd go ahead and finish this now, but I'm kinda sleepy.
Good morning! Look, that story last night was just an excuse to shoehorn in the Chuck Berry performance where Yoko Ono screams but the sound engineer muted her mic. It's amazing. Time for breakfast.
I don't mean to flex, but I eat a lot of bananas. Well, more than seven months ago I started to. Turns out I have a lactose allergy. I already ghosted cereal-shilling birds, big cats, and amphibians a decade ago because of a gluten allergy. (Did you know most of those so-called cartoon characters don't even have their own cartoons?) Upending twenty years of yogurt as “part of this complete breakfast” was harder. Enter bananas.
Not just any bananas — the spendy kind from Madeira. I have geographic privilege and can afford sustainable, ethically sourced, palatably superior fruit from my European socialist ivory bidet.
Bananas are miraculous. And an atheist's worst nightmare. Just ask Mike Seaver and his evangelical New Zealand buddy. That's also on YouTube. His logic's appealing.
Speaking of bad puns and innuendo, when did we swap the banana for the eggplant as the penis emoji? And what do bananas mean, now? Well, in football (ahem, “soccer”), banana peels are thrown at black players by racist assholes. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, they're a meh question block drop in Mario Kart games. In the Donkey Kong Country games they're — SCREECH. (Note to self: purge all “Diddy Kong” references.)
Back in the halcyon days of June 2024, a court ordered Chiquita, of banana lady fame, to pay $38 million to the families of eight people murdered by death squads in Columbia. You know, because they financed the animals with guns. The fruit trade and extortion and terrorism are all more complicated than that, but, for the sake of fairness, let's say there were very shitty people on both sides. 🍌 😉
Now where was I? Oh yeah, comedy.
Back in November of 2024, when there was no other news of note, Sotheby's auctioned off Maurizio Cattelan's 2019 conceptual art piece “Comedian” for $6.2 million. It's a banana duct taped to the wall. Well, not “a” banana. You've got to replace the banana every seven to ten days. And probably the duct tape. Gray only. Also, it's the second of a series. (Don't ask.) Some crypto bro in Hong Kong bought it and ate it. No complaints here. Eating bananas is kosher.
So, is a banana taped to a wall art?
Sure. These kind of (don't) think (too hard) pieces have several generations of banana farmers of precedence. I prefer Duchamp's readymades, but “Fountain,” wasn't without its charm. Bonus points for ladies who manage to piss on the face of a men's room sculpture. (Turns out it may've originally been created by a woman: the utterly inspiring Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.)
But art isn't about what I think. It's a secular ecumenical matter.
As such, I asked a bunch of my English students about “Comedian.”
The adults gave nuanced, sophisticated answers. A real bore.
The kids were better:
“Of course that's a joke.”
“It's art, but it's not good art.”
“It needs a monkey. Monkeys love bananas.”
My ten-year-old daughter also weighed in:
“I think he was drunk or something.”
Valid, insightful critiques.
I, myself, have minted a pretty penny from banana-based jokes riffing on other people's premises. (You down with OPP? Popeye's in the public domain now. Him and Steamboat Willie are definitely DTF.)
Back in a pre-Covid classroom in Việt Nam, I once drew a banana on the dry erase board, took a long sniff off the marker, then elicited the word from screaming children.
“Moon!”
“Snake!”
“Knife!”
“Banana!”
Three of those were students' English names.
I squeaked out block capitals. “B-A-N-A.”
“N-A!” yelled the kids. “N-A, N-A, N-A, N-A!”
“Okay,” I said. “B-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A. Banananananana.”
They howled and I'd successfully killed five minutes.
That netted me about $1. Add $5 for this column, and I've got Peter Andre potassium poisoning money. Don't worry, come inflation or End Times, I've got a safety net.
There's always money in the banana stand.
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