The opinions expressed in The Lawrentian are those of the students, faculty and community members who wrote them. The Lawrentian does not endorse any opinions piece except for the staff editorial, which represents a majority of the editorial board. The Lawrentian welcomes everyone to submit their own opinions. For the full editorial policy and parameters for submitting articles, please refer to the About section.
In 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan sold two editions of his work “Comedian” at auction for $120,000 apiece. This work featured a fresh banana duct taped to a wall, as well as a certificate of authenticity and detailed instructions for the piece’s maintenance and display. The internet, upon hearing about this work, and especially upon hearing its price tag, blew up in outrage. How could such a simple thing as a banana duct taped to a wall sell for such exorbitant amounts of money? What idiot would pay that much for something so silly? How could this ridiculous thing be considered art at all?
There is, however, quite a long history of precedent for gallery pieces like this. As an art history major, I see this and I immediately think of Duchamp, the French artist who infamously submitted an everyday, manufactured urinal with a signature on it entitled “Fountain” to a gallery in 1917. This piece, similarly, was met with a combination of outrage and complete dismissiveness. Decades later, partly because of the merit of the work itself but also partly as a result of Duchamp’s previously held notoriety in the art world and his tendency towards future publicity stunts (such as his public retreat from the art world in 1923 to focus on playing chess), “Fountain” is considered by some to be a fundamental work in the American art canon. His stunt of submitting a urinal to an art gallery was not just for the controversy of it all, but to answer vital questions that faced the contemporary art world: what is the role of the artist in making art? What defines art itself?
Duchamp’s answer: the urinal is art because it has been removed from its context as an everyday object and placed in the context where it can now be considered art. Duchamp is the work’s artist not because he built the urinal himself, but because he chose the object, and he made the decision to change its context.
This was Duchamp’s first attempt to submit what he called a ready-made to a gallery, but it would not be his only piece of that kind. For example, he also had a piece consisting of a snow shovel suspended from the ceiling, which was called “In Advance of the Broken Arm” (1915). Duchamp and the team of avant-garde artists surrounding him took massive steps via their work to change the art world’s perception of what art could be. At the time, art was getting more and more abstract as the likes of Kandinsky in Germany and Matisse in France were relying more on shape and color than truly representational details in their portraits and landscapes. As the world’s avant-garde movements quickly grew unsatisfied with each other, week after week, artists began trending towards further and further abstraction, first in color, then in form, then in subject and finally, with Duchamp, in the medium.
Haters of Contemporary art tend to look at pieces like the duct taped banana and see it in a vacuum, lacking the context of art history to gather meaning from it. I would argue that, meaningful or not in its own right, pieces like Cattelan’s “Comedian” are hugely influenced by the art that came before them, which themselves were reactions to the art world’s rapid changes in the early 20th century. To look at “Comedian” without an understanding of its cultural predecessors is to not get the full picture of what the piece means.
Contemporary art can be lifechanging when consumed with the correct cultural context, which is why it so often falls flat for people who do not regularly consume art. This is why a good understanding of art history, particularly in the avant-garde’s many movements, is an enlightening tool when deciphering highly conceptual art.