Our Values and What It Means for Art
Art eludes definition. It might be a banana taped to a wall, or a deranged comedian on a movie screen. Or neither, depending upon the eye of the beholder.
The director Martin Scorsese wrote in The Times that he does not see art in the comic book adaptations proliferating in Hollywood, adding that many in the business seem to have an “absolute indifference to the very question of art.”
The tension between an artist’s vision and a studio’s bank account has always been part of making movies, but, he wrote, “it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made. Today, that tension is gone.” The financial dominance of “audiovisual entertainment,” he added, has created a climate that is “brutal and inhospitable to art.”
The director Todd Phillips seemed to understand this when he pitched his idea for “Joker.” He wanted to make a gritty character study, according to The Times, so he reimagined the origin story of the Batman villain, making him a mentally ill comedian in clown makeup, as “a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film.”
Whether movies even qualified as art was once questioned. When Mr. Scorsese and others of his generation began their careers, he wrote, they “stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance.”
Other art forms face their own questions. Questions like: Is a banana worth $150,000 when it is duct-taped to a wall? Follow-up: Does this “art” taste good?
The answer to the second was provided by David Datuna, a performance artist who plucked the fruit from a piece titled “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan at Art
Basel Miami last month and ate it. Mr. Datuna wrote on Instagram: “Art performance by me. I love Maurizio Cattelan artwork and I really love this installation. It’s very delicious.”
That banana was replaced, and the piece sold three times at a price from $120,000 to $150,000 each.
The Times’s Jason Farago defended Mr. Cattelan’s pricey work as art, writing that “you are not a hopeless philistine if you find this all a bit foolish.” He added, “Foolishness, and the deflating sensation that a culture that once encouraged sublime beauty now only permits dopey jokes, is Mr. Cattelan’s stock in trade.”
Mr. Farago contrasted Mr. Cattelan to the street artist Banksy, who, he wrote, “satisfies a dismayingly common belief that all artists are con artists, and that museums, collectors and critics are either dupes or hustlers.”
Real artists are not trying to trick anyone, Mr. Farago said, adding that the difference between Mr. Cattelan and Banksy (“a tedious and culturally irrelevant prankster”) is that Mr. Cattelan implicates himself “within the economic, social and discursive systems that structure how we see and what we value.” Mr. Cattelan, he said, “like all the best clowns, is a tragedian who makes our certainties as slippery as a banana peel.”
Add the stand-up comedian Dan Soder to the list of clowns here that includes Joker and Mr. Cattelan. But do not call him an artist. The Times’s Jason Zinoman wrote that Mr. Soder “mocks the pretentiousness of comics who call themselves artists.”
“You think I compete with art?” Mr. Soder asks. “There’s no drink minimum at the ballet.”
Making ‘certainties as slippery as a banana peel.’