Sometimes a banana is just a banana — but not last month, when Sotheby’s resold a specimen of the fruit as artwork for $6.2 million, complete with duct tape for affixing to your wall.
The banana’s creator, Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan, considers the artwork, called “Comedian,” a joke — but the joke is on us: We’re stuck in an economy fueled by speculation, with the price of everything from stocks to real estate barely this side of nonsensical.
The banana shows how a price can have no relation to value. You might pay decent money for a Monet, for two reasons: You love the artwork, and you can’t recreate the original.
It’s likely to increase its value while you’re enjoying it, because other people will someday want the artwork.
Neither of those reasons holds up in the banana case.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
Photo by PETER PARKS/AFP via Getty Images