Would you buy a banana for $6.2 million?

Truth is, it's much harder -- as we prepare for Christmas -- to examine our own choices

I confess that I have zero understanding of most modern art.

Yes, I have seen exhibits of glass, metal, lights, etc., that I think are beautiful and, at times, I can see evidence of why knowledgeable people consider them to be works of art. Ditto for many abstract paintings that, in some way, offer visions into the creation around us.

However, I am so backward that I do not understand why an upside-down urinal — when given the name “Fountain” — became one of the 20th Century’s most important artistic statements. I suspect that it was a statement that “art” is whatever is declared “art” by the cultural caste that defines (and funds) “art.”

At that point, it’s clear that artists are the people who understand the worldview of the cultural caste that defines “art.” Art professors are the people who educate students to produce works of “art” that will be praised by members of the cultural caste that fund “art.”

Modern art lovers and art collectors are people who have bought into the world created by artistic elites who, etc., etc.

This brings us to some realities in the global marketplace of ideas, including many of the media signals that we allow to shape and define us. There is more to this puzzle than strange tales about modern art, but we will start there.

At the moment, a banana — at a nearby Walmart — currently costs 26 cents. You can buy a roll of silver duct tape for about $4.

What will an art lover pay for this banana, when it is combined with a strip of tape, a flat surface, and a large dose of irony? To answer that, consider this update from the Associated Press: “Cryptocurrency entrepreneur who bought banana art for $6.2 million eats the fruit in Hong Kong.”

HONG KONG (AP) — A cryptocurrency entrepreneur who bought a piece of conceptual art consisting of a simple banana, duct-taped to a wall, for $6.2 million last week ate the fruit in Hong Kong on Friday.

Chinese-born Justin Sun peeled off the duct tape and enjoyed the banana in a press conference held in The Peninsula Hong Kong, one of the city’s priciest hotels, in the popular shopping district of Tsim Sha Tsui.

“It tastes much better than other bananas. Indeed, quite good,” he said.

But here is the key to this story about the world in which we live. Sun didn’t really eat a $6.2 banana. What he actually consumed was the intellectual concept that a banana attached to a wall with a strip of duct tape was a work of art that was worth $6.2 million.

Keep reading!

“Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, was a phenomenon when it debuted in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, as festivalgoers tried to make out whether the single yellow piece of fruit affixed to a white wall with silver duct tape was a joke or a cheeky commentary on questionable standards among art collectors. At one point, another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it.

The piece attracted so much attention that it had to be withdrawn from view. But three editions sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, according to the gallery handling sales at the time.

Last week, Sun, founder of cryptocurrency platform TRON, made the winning bid at the Sotheby’s auction in New York. Or, more accurately, Sun purchased a certificate of authenticity that gives him the authority to duct-tape a banana to a wall and call it “Comedian.”

If you want to know more about the doctrines woven into this cultural drama, surf this Google News research file and draw your own conclusions.

Maybe you are thinking: This is crazy. This is a crazy view of art. And this has nothing to do with me.

OK, let’s ask the AI gods at Google to define “art.” I did that search, which yielded the following:

Art is the conscious use of imagination and skill to create a visual object or experience that expresses ideas or emotions:

— Definition

Art is the expression of ideas and emotions through a physical medium. It can be created in many different media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, and installation art.

— Purpose

Art can exist on a continuum from purely aesthetic to purely utilitarian purposes. For example, a potter or weaver may create a work that is both beautiful and functional.

— Definition in flux

The definition of art is constantly changing and evolving. The definition and perceived value of works of art have changed throughout history and in different cultures.

From my perspective, the key phrase is this: “The definition and perceived value of works of art have changed throughout history and in different cultures.”

Ah, and all cultures are not created equal. A banana attached to a wall with duct tape in a grocery store in small-town America is not the same as one that has been validated with a certificate by experts in New York City.

If you ate that rural banana, you ate a banana with traces of sticky tape junk. But if you ate the Manhattan banana, you are something totally different — you are an eccentric supporter of modern art. You have made a profession of faith that you are the kind of person who knows that consuming that $6.2 million banana will raise your stature in the elite world of people who have embraced the doctrines of modern art. It’s sort of like a secular sacrament that changes your soul.

This really isn’t news. It’s an extension of cultural debates that hit the mainstream in the 1960s and kept going. Up is down. Black is white. Beauty is defined by cultural elites. Ditto for “truth.” “They” is a singular pronoun. There are zero transcendent absolutes.

Where am I going with this?

We are well into a season that, in our culture, is largely defined by advertising and consumption.

What do the ads say, over and over?

I am a college football fan, which means that I watch lots of advertisements during college football games.

At halftime, each of the institutions of higher learning that have teams competing in the game will each be featured in an advertisement that, as a rule, declaring that this or that school is producing students that are changing the world and making it a better place. There happy, smiling students are pictured doing all kinds of things in labs, on stages, in public service and in other fun activities. Have you ever seen a students reading books, or writing term papers, in one of these advertisements?

What about the beer ads? What do the visuals say? Right now, Bud Light ads are urgently proclaiming a return to masculinity. Why is that? Has the beer changed?

Watch ads for Disney theme parks. What do the images in these ads say about modern parents and their children?

My point, in this season of shopping, is that we are living in a world of advertising images that preach sermons to us describing what truly matters in this life. We rarely stop and think about the logic and doctrines behind these mini-sermons because they are the cultural air that we inhale.

It’s rather like the world of modern art. We are urged to purchase products that show people who we believe that we are. Men of a certain age are tempted to purchase expensive sports cars. Some women are driven to fill walk-in closets (the size of small bedrooms) with shoes they will wear once or twice. I am sure that I would own several dozen high-end acoustic guitars if I could afford to do so.

All of this is connected to that trio of questions built into the Rational Sheep definition of “discipleship” (as described in the overture for this project): How do we spend our time? How do we spend our money? How do we make our decisions?

Years ago, I was asked a question about this image-based culture by an editor from the Journal of Homiletics. I quoted a passage from that interview in an earlier Rational Sheep podcast, but here it is again — just in time for Cyber Monday. Here is the full quotation:

HOMILETICS: Much has been said about the movement from an oral culture to a print culture to an electronic culture. But isn't the electronic culture really a new version of the oral culture?

MATTINGLY: Not an oral culture. We live now in a visual culture. There's the famous quote from founder of MTV: "We're not here to give them messages; we're here to give them a kick in the gut." We live now in a culture that dominated by visuals that provoke experience, feeling and emotion.

HOMILETICS: But is it that much different from the stained glass windows of the medieval cathedrals?

MATTINGLY: No. I disagree. About half the ads on television today make no sense whatsoever in a linear fashion in terms of having anything remotely to do with the product. They're getting across an attitude, a mood. They're asking, "Do you want to be the kind of person who uses this product?" One ad theorist has said that "they presume the product has a soul." If you think as a sacramental Christian, people are taking communion at the mall. They are consuming the product, the soul of the product, to become the essence of the product. It's a liturgical experience. They're taking communion at the mall! They are what they eat, which is the essence of the ancient church's definition of communion.

So the visual culture primarily speaks to experience and emotion, and by the way, I am not saying that visual media is bad. To use the Reformed tradition's language, "God is the God of all creation, but glorious and fallen." I believe that. I am not opposed to television or film. But if you have a culture in which those are the only forms of media that people used for the critical moments, the dominant, statistical moments of their lives, what does that culture look like? I would argue it's a culture that makes most of its decisions based on feelings, emotions, and experience.

HOMILETICS: And isn't that the culture in which we're living?

MATTINGLY: That's the culture we live in. And this finally gets us to your question about absolutes. There are no absolutes in a culture based on feelings and experience. The phrase I use in my class, "The Church in the Age of Entertainment," at the end of my opening lecture, I say to students: "I'm going to say something that you will not understand now, but at the end of the class you will. You live in a culture that is technologically hostile to the very concept of doctrine."

Yes, I looked for a TikTok video on this topic, but couldn’t seem to find one.

I know. It’s really easy to laugh about a rich guy buying a $6.2 million banana. That doesn’t hit very close to home.

Truth is, it’s much harder — during the quiet season of Nativity Lent (Advent in the West) — to focus on the messages soaked into the media signals that surround me and, yes, the products that I am tempted to buy, so that they can define me and change me.

You know? Can I get an “Amen”?