If You Don’t Get It Just Suck On It (Until You Choke)
It’s been a couple of weeks since the controversy of a banana taped to a wall displayed at one of the most important art gatherings on the planet erupted to become the most relevant and conclusive situation in this prestigious event. Now the controversy seems to be dissipating, the waters are back to calm, another gallery made a fortune out of another fool, another so-called artist gets away with the joke, and the art community walks away with another severe scar.
Art Basel with its three chapters, Basel — Switzerland, Miami Beach — USA and HongKong, covering the art market in three continents has raised to become the most important gathering of contemporary art in the world, the “must be” event for galleries, artists and collectors. However, I have to wonder, did Art Basel concluded with the same reputation as the leading art event in the world? when a banana taped to a wall, called “sculpture” out of a whim and without any attributes, steals the show and becomes the most relevant “piece”.
Can we still call this event a success? I think not, not at all and in fact, it should be considered more like a failure. If I was in the board of Art Basel organizers and supporters and had some dignity left on me I would be dead worried after so much money and effort put into this enterprise.
Art Basel is not the only culprit (or victim) of this situation, every year, through several art events we have to endure the sight of several other unscrupulous galleries showing talentless, unoriginal and lazy “artists” flipping off on the rest of the art community and with a big “fuck you” statement, disrupting the entire development of what could have been an opportunity to discover great new artists and new ways of real artistic expression. However when confronted with the situation artists and spectators can only say with shrugged shoulders and disjointed faces, “…well, you know, they are the authorities, they are more educated, they know better and we just don’t get it”, but, how true is this?
In my country, we have a saying:
“Todos los días sale un pendejo a la calle, el que lo coja es suyo”.
Roughly translated from the Venezuelan Spanish slang it means, “ Every day an imbecile goes wandering in the street and that who catches him owns him”
People are completely entitled to spend or waste their money in any way they feel. If somebody felt the need of spending 120 thousand US dollars on a banana taped to the wall that’s completely ok, the problem lies in the effect that this kind of practice is producing in the art community, the spectators and even further in the human development.
When we allow this kind of rubbish to be labeled as art and displayed at a fancy event with an overpriced tag we are contributing to a sustained and systematic detriment of our intelligence.
Art, in any of its expressions and disciplines, is the most elevated form of human ingenuity, the ability of producing music like sounds, codes that would become language, graphic records used to registering events, tell stories and even expressing emotions are some of the main attributes that separated us from basic primates and guaranteed our development into what we are today. However, we insist on compromising those aspects of our human intelligence by lowering our standards of education.
There is a myriad of benefits to our brain and to our general being that comes from exposing ourselves to art.
Art contributes to the developing of our intellect by challenging our established parameters, promoting critical thinking, displaying new alternatives of expression and communication, offering a springboard from where new ideas can be born; but for all this to happen it is necessary to create a connection between the spectator and the experience.
When we are exposed to this kind of non-art the effect could be the contrary, we can experience confusion, we are somehow misled into thinking that we are not worthy, not educated enough to be capable of understanding, we feel intimidated by the experience preventing us from engaging with more art or the spaces where these are displayed, creating a distance not only from the piece but very often from art in general. All this can be perceived in a way as an attack on our self-confidence.
Galleries, Museums and Art Fairs are not exempt from the responsibility of the decaying of the art world, these places that in better times were institutions of education and exaltation of real art are now reduced to empty shell spaces used as an excuse to validate works with absolutely no value and even less merit.
We can’t forget that we haven’t stopped evolving, evolution is a continuous and never-ending process and the more we allow and endorse these kinds of practices we are inevitably compromising that evolutive process, with the normalization of a society where everything goes, where laziness and lack of principles dictate our parameters, where easiness and low standards are the norms, where we attribute value to rubbish and give merit to crooks, cheaters, scammers, and buffoons while they are being glorified as geniuses. When we finally desensitize ourselves from all this bullshit we will be leading ourselves to a very dark and sad future.
In the meantime, I can give you a quick interpretation of what a banana taped to a wall means. The banana represents our humanity and all our ingenuity being blindfolded and restrained to an empty space, condemned to sit there slowly rotting and decaying until it is finally rendered into a putrid and worthless black shell while we are being told that it’s ok, that is actually beautiful and very valuable. But, if I have to be there to explain it to you then there is a big chance that this is neither a very good piece of art nor a very effective way of communicating the message and that the only place this “sculpture” belongs is in the trash can.
