A Chinese billionaire who cooperates with the CCP bought for several millions a work of art consisting in a fresh banana fixed on a wall with duct tape—and said he will just eat it.
by Massimo Introvigne
Last week, we learned that Chinese billionaire Justin Sun bought at a Sotheby auction for $6.2 million one of the versions of “Comedian,” a work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The work consists of a fresh banana fixed on a wall with a piece of duct tape, plus instructions on how to replace the banana with a similar one when it rots.
In 2019, Cattelan purchased several bananas at a Miami grocery store for $0.30 each, produced three editions of his work called “Comedian” and signed certificates of authenticity for them. He sold two at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair for $120,000 each. The third was donated to the Guggenheim Museum. The price seems to have skyrocketed since.
Sun’s purchase made headlines internationally, and a comment from the perspective of what it tells us of contemporary Chinese society is not inappropriate. But first I should ask the readers not to get me wrong.
Before I wrote and lectured on the visual arts’ connections with new religious movements, I had a father who was a modern art collector. Happily, before I needed to do it, he hammered in the heads of his grandchildren (my children) the notion that only an idiot would deny the artistic value of a hole in a canvas by Fontana, an all-white painting by Malevich, or even the urinal bought at an ordinary hardware shop, signed “R. Mutt,” and exhibited as a sculpture by Duchamp, with the argument “any child would be able to do this.”
Patiently, Grandpa explained that yes, a child can “reproduce” each of these works easily, and the reproductions would have no value, but a child would never have the “idea” of creating such art and endow it with a meaning in the first place. Fontana, Malevich, and Duchamp were leading artists because not of their techniques (although they all proved they were able to produce more conventional art of high technical quality too) but of their ideas. While the jury may be still out for Cattelan, dismissing his banana as a mere “fraud” is, again, just too easy.
Here, I am not dealing with Cattelan, who in a wonderful interview after the sale poked fun at himself, the auction houses, the art market, and the collectors. I am dealing with Justin Sun, who said he plans to actually “eat” the banana, although this is not in Cattelan’s instructions. Cattelan couldn’t care less, and answered a question on the matter by stating that “at least Sun will finally be able to say he had digested contemporary art.”
While Cattelan’s artistic performance or provocation, like Duchamp’s famous urinal, can be interpreted in different ways, Sun’s attitude is just a stupid exhibition of how, being very rich, he can waste millions of dollars freely and even literally eat them. The act of eating the $6.2 million banana is particularly symbolic: how many starving people could Sun have fed with the same money? The question is not rhetoric. It would not apply to a billionaire who would spend millions to buy a work by Michelangelo or Kandinsky, just as I regard as ridiculous suggestions that the Vatican should sell the Sistine Chapel to feed the poor. These works will stay forever and, as Jesus told Satan (of all people), “man shall not live by bread alone.” Not so with Cattelan’s banana, more accurately one of his several bananas.
And perhaps the question would be less poignant if Sun were not a product of the elite academic system of the People’s Republic of China and of the exclusive Zhejiang Hupan Entrepreneurship Research Center, when it was still operated by Jack Ma and Ma was still in the good graces of the CCP. True, Sun left China in 2017 when Xi Jinping cracked down on the predatory practices in the field that made him (Sun, not Xi) a billionaire, cryptocurrencies. For a while, Sun even played in the U.S. the role of a capitalist allegedly exiled for its anti-Communist ideas.
This was, however, short-lived. When Xi Jinping decided that China should create its own cryptocurrencies, Sun was asked to write an article, which was published, in the magazine of the Chinese Communist Party School. Also, he was appointed deputy leader of a research project on blockchains by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a research institute under the direct supervision of the Chinese government.
While problems with different Chinese courts and regulatory agencies are the other side of Sun’s coin, clearly the tycoon is a son of the CCP. He is a prodigal son perhaps, but one who from time to time is welcomed back home and the Party is reluctant to disavow.
What does Sun’s banana tell us about the seriousness of Xi’s calls to sobriety and moderation for his red billionaires? Not less than the poor young men and women who in China refuse to work, live by gimmicks, and sometimes end up committing acts of violence or suicide, the rich Sun is living evidence of the bankruptcy of the CCP ideology.
As Dostoevsky famously asked with the words of one of his characters in “The Brothers Karamazov,” yes, you can build a world without God based only on science, money, and ideology “but what will become of men then?… without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?” The answer is yes, they can do what they like, including being formed by and working with an officially Marxist party and at the same time buying and eating without regrets a $6.2 million banana.
