The Artist as Comedian

Justin Sun purchased Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual artwork Comedian (2019), better known as “a banana duct-taped to the wall,” at a Sotheby’s auction for $6.2 million on November 21, 2024. The following day, The New York Times published an “explainer” about the sale, an editorial decision that tells us two things: many people are interested in this particular art transaction, and they are highly confused about what it means to “own” a perishable banana affixed to a wall with duct tape. 

No, Justin Sun will probably not eat the banana that was on display at Sotheby’s — the banana itself is not the artwork. Comedian is a specific, concisely defined idea that may be contained in varying physical forms. That is to say, you can place the idea inside any banana, but not an orange. What Justin Sun has purchased is the authority to designate any banana that he eats as The Banana. That is the true “immaterial value” of the banana.

Comedian is not the first conceptual artwork that Sun has purchased for a head-scratching sum of money. In 2021, he acquired two editions of a conceptual art project on the blockchain that I had created, titled Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (2017).

In Digital Zones, I pointed out that cryptocurrency’s model of “materiality and ownership” was first made explicit by the French conceptual artist Yves Klein. In 1958, Klein sold “invisible artworks” which, he claimed, contained the “sensibility” of a painting, in exchange for gold. The purchaser was issued a certificate affirming their legal ownership of that immaterial artwork. Klein issued standardized, verifiable, numbered receipts that corresponded to artworks of vague physical properties. This act, in my view, prototyped an ownership model that has been mainstreamed sixty years later in the crypto economy. 

In a 33-page essay that I included as part of the Digital Zones project, titled The Blue Paper, I wrote about how Klein defined different forms of ownership:

Through the exchange of these pieces, Klein was able to draw parallels between the immateriality of his “scandalous” artwork and the immateriality of traditional ideas of ownership. Klein distinguished between two related but fundamentally different types of ownership: the absolute ownership of the thing, and the legal ownership of the deed to the thing. In different terms, we could say he separated the ownership of spiritual use value and material exchange value.‍

This is a tricky concept, but it is one that Justin Sun understands along with most holders of cryptocurrency. It therefore came as no shock to me that the purchaser of Comedian heralded from the world of crypto. It’s not just because crypto people love memes, although that certainly helps. It is because they are comfortable with the premise of holding something imaginary, while also understanding how to extract that “spiritual use value” out of the immaterial. 

Two days after The Banana joined Digital Zones in Sun’s collection, another edition of Digital Zones was ending its run in an exhibition alongside Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol at the Venice Biennale. The show was a massive, three-storey gesamtkunstwerk at the Fondazione Prada by Swiss conceptual artist Christoph Büchel, titled “Monte di Pietà.” Its premise was to present different ways in which faith and belief have been transubstantiated into financial value throughout history, usually for ill. Often art has facilitated that transubstantiation; sometimes it has even done so knowingly, explicitly, and self-critically; almost always it has done so by figuring out how to commodify what was previously uncommodifiable.

The exhibition in Venice included Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond (1924), a performance piece in which the artist asked collectors to purchase shares of his presumed winnings on a casino trip; Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Bonds (2005), promissory notes which entitled the holder to poop that would be generated by his robotic poop-making sculpture in the future; and Digital Zones, arguably the first non-fungible token conceptual art project, which proposed that artworks like the ones mentioned above were fairly accurate metaphors for crypto.

‍Digital Zones was meant to critique both conceptual art and crypto culture by revealing their analogous nature. Whether that shared nature is genius or a grift is left as an open question. Of course, it is both. 

At the time I created Digital Zones, art and crypto were parallel mechanisms for delivering the scammy and the sublime simultaneously. Now, as demonstrated by the sale of a $6 million banana, they are fully intertwined and conjoined. To my own surprise, I am cautiously optimistic about this development.

‍Comedian, like the other conceptual artworks exhibited in Venice, explicitly points out the ways that the entire art world is a scam. And yet, by making that statement so deftly, it also shows us how a scam can deliver a moment of profound truth. At a time when scams seem inescapable, especially in the world of crypto, that is an important lesson.