/lit/ - Literature

>>14314001
For some added context the banana did sell for 120k usd. A second banana also sold for 120k usd. A third was expected to sell for 150k usd but a different performance artist ate the banana which is in itself being considered as art.

The bananas were sold with a certificate of authenticity that allowed the owner to change out the banana when it got mouldy.

>>14314020
>The bananas were sold with a certificate of authenticity

Exit throught he giftshop level of consumerism

>>14314020
based

i like how he tucked the duct tape into the crease between the wall and the banana instead of just slapping it on haphazardly. exquisite.

>implying /lit/ knows anything about current art and doesn't just complain about the odd post-modern piece that makes the news because of how outrageous it is

>>14314075
>implying current art is not exactly the same sort of money laundering nonsense bought and sold by pedophiles

Art's difficult to do when you're poor because you've got no resources to dump into getting good and even more difficult when you actually have the money for it because you were likely raised to be a drab, soulless, uncreative, decadent, self-important shit as is standard for (petite) bourgeois.
It takes some delicate blend of economic privilege but also good parenting? struggles in life? to keep you grounded and human so you can make stuff worth consuming.

Comedy has become reality

>>14314078
Do you have any examples to back up your statement?

>>14314086
Money laundering? Everybody knows.

Pedo? that's news to me.

>>14314086
Example? A Banana taped to a wall by an adhesive, precisely tape, precisely duct tape, sold for $120,000, it is currently being categorised as art, it seems to me someone is trying to move some money
>but bro someone bought it

>>14314001
>thinking this "piece" exists for any reason other than money laundering

>muh labor theory of value
Marxsissies blown out again

>>14314104
I think he's just insinuating a connection with wealthy elites and pedos. Givin the news of epstien thats not a huge stretch of the imagination

It's been done
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAExa9P7hME

>>14314001
>what needs to change

I feel that the only way to go forward is to shock and simultaneously push away from the traditionalist oldguard art consumers in our society. this is incredibly simple to understand, but what is peculiar to our time is that the fuddy duddy traditionalists have already been driven off long ago, and now it's the elitist cosmopolitan socialites who formerly drove art that need to be cast aside- but since that would mean spurning art's biggest consumer base it can never happen in a marketable way and hence would not ever be considered art until decades in retro spect where it has already lost its potency

tl;dr art died years ago. it will likely never ever come back. sry

>>14314020
I didn't realize this guy was an artist himself. That kind of sucks. I thought he was just some guy who decided to eat the banana.

>>14314001
Oh my God how the fuck are these faggots still pulling this shit in two thousand and twenty, it isn't new or insightful and has been done regularly for almost a whole damn century by now. This is getting absurd. This might have been an interesting stunt in the 1950s. Worse than the academic art meme at this point. Creativity bankrupt. Visual arts need to accept that the traditional arts like painting and sculpture has literally zero impact on larger culture in our time period and to stop larping like they are Manet revolutionizing the salon. If you wouldn't create something knowing that nobody would see it than you shouldn't be making anything in the first place
At this point I'm going to try to bring back grand historical paintings to piss there faggots off

>>14314171
that would've been far too shocking and genuine for the art world of today

>>14314141
When is this dude gonna post more videos

>>14314020
This shit is what Paolo Sorrentino was mocking in La Grande Bellezza. Fake tryhard artists with no actual depth of statement.

>>14314180
True, yoko ono did the same thing in the 60s with an apple. Its also supposedly the story of how Lennon and her met, when he took a bite out of the apple.

A substantial part of the higher art world is involved in money laundering. This is something that the people with their worthless art degress that give post-hoc "clever" reasons for its value will never come to grips with, because they are naive as to how the world works (usually while calling everyone "childish" because "you just don't understand the aesthetic value of this work"). The same people that will give 5000 words of convoluted theoretical defenses of this stuff, while money laundering is happening, are the same people that go to great lengths to deny multiculturalism's effects on social trust or the nature of ethnic crime statistics. Get them to post their faces and 100% you'll see they are skinny-necked white or jewish guys with black framed glasses with a big stack of New Yorker magazines behind them and bookshelves filled with academia-approved "theory" (but no actual literature). These people are brainwashed.

>>14314086
If there was evidence, then this would cease working as a viable and, dare I say, legitimate means of money laundering. On paper, two people transacted for a piece of very expensive artwork. Unless you can prove otherwise, it is a perfectly legitimate transaction. This is where the utility lies in contemporary art money laundering.

>>14314020
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/06/banksy-sothebys-auction-prank-leaves-art-world-in-shreds-girl-with-balloon

>>14314086
Abour a dollar worth of materials that a literal chimpanzee could produce being sold for 150 grand.
Money laundering plain and simple.

>>14314379
>>14314399
Not the same anon, and I agree there is likely a lot of money laundering going on in the art sphere. But in order to launder money a piece of art needs to retain its value to be sold again.
Im not sure that the buyer will be capable of reselling the duct tape banana at an equal or higher price in order to complete the laundering process.

>>14314086
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-attractive-refuge-for-money-launderers.html
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Aartnet.com+%22money+laundering%22
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22art+dealer%22+%22money+laundering%22

>>14314410
>But in order to launder money a piece of art needs to retain its value to be sold again
lol it's the MONEY being laundered, not the object. bad money buys shifty wares, bad money is now in hands of artist or art dealer (who are likely in cahoots with money laundering billionaries or drug lords and get a cut to shut up), now the money is legit money and can be re-shifted back to the shady buyer via legit means (real estate, expensive cars, and so on)

>>14314397
Banksy is a giant fucking fag and the auction house was in on it, only pretending to be shocked by this.

>>14314443
I swear this whole "woah it's a Banksy I didn't even know! This really says a lot about our society..." has been done four or five times by this point.

>>14314441
Thats not how laundering works. The value needs to be temporarily stored in the artwork and the bad money needs to transfer to an unknowing party. If the artist is in cahoots its no longer laundering, there would still be a paper trail of bad money in that case.

>>14314180
>how the fuck are these faggots still pulling this shit in two thousand and twenty, it isn't new or insightful and has been done regularly for almost a whole damn century by now. This is getting absurd. This might have been an interesting stunt in the 1950s. Worse than the academic art meme at this point. Creativity bankrupt.
I agree with every word here. I don't dislike contemporary art in principle, but fuck, the artist faggot should feel shame for being so fucking unoriginal. I admit that the banana, purely visually, looks positively absurd and all, but who the fuck cares at this point?
>Visual arts need to accept that the traditional arts like painting and sculpture has literally zero impact on larger culture in our time period and to stop larping like they are Manet revolutionizing the salon. If you wouldn't create something knowing that nobody would see it than you shouldn't be making anything in the first place
The shitty thing is that this jerkoff turned to be, actually, quite popular and influential among the wide audience.
I'm glad to live in a European country that has a bit healthier art scene, although it is phlegmatic and small, we don't have nearly as much of this shamelessly empty exhibitionism, and there's even a nice movement of younger artists back towards realism. But what the fuck should I say to Americans on the internet, who seem to be surrounded by this attention-whoring crap?

>>14314501
That is how it works, and you have no idea what you're on about. It's called MONEY laundering you stupid dipshit. The purpose of this process is to take dirty money and clean it in a process that is usually controlled from start to end by money launderers. The invariant object in this process is the MONEY. The process you described as "money laundering" has no control at all over the invariant or over the steps in the process (what the money flows through). Under your dumb conception of money laundering they lose track of both the dirty money and control over who gets it. There's a reason so many major art dealers have been investigated, because many of them are in on it.

Go read a book on forensic accounting and stop speaking out of your ass.

>>14314561
You keep emphasizing that its about the money and not the art. I get that. But a banana taped to a wall isnt a good vehicle to launder money. At some point the value needs to be put in the molded fruit.
Art is a good vehicle to launder money because the sales are opaque and transactions can happen across country borders without record or tax *and can be done in secrecy*.
But this spoiling banana is currently in the public spotlight for its absurdity. If this was an attempt at laundering money it was a shit showing.

can someone ”in the know” post some good modern art

>>14314643
Every time I ask this question people post pieces that have to be accompanied by large blocks of text in order to be truly “understood.”

>>14314001
The problem with the art world is that it isn't subject to the same scrutiny as other markets, so what we have today is the result of billionaire hedge funds massively inflating the value of contemporary art between 2003-2008 and the inevitable crash that followed. There's nothing wrong with people exhibiting dumb shit for plebs but if we can't trust the art world to value these works accurately, then something has to change.

>>14314001
Contemporary art is rich people circle jerking, it has nothing to do with art

>>14314001
>What is your opinion on the current climate in the art world.
It has become a classist insult. In a world where millions of people live paycheck to paycheck and struggle, these elitists throw away money on frivolities of conspicuous consumption such as this banana.

Art has become, far from an expression of the contemplation of truth and beauty, far from an exploration of ideas, emotions, and forms, an inside joke and a circle jerk.

There is the stink of the ancien régime about these purchases, a "let them eat cake" sort of attitude, which a rational person can only hope and pray leads to open violence and unrest in due time.

>>14314643

>>14314837

>>14314849

>>14314857
(I'm not "in the know", probably, just posting shit that I've seen at exhibitions and liked)

>>14314887

>>14314857
Really like this one

>>14314837
>>14314849
>>14314857
>>14314887
>>14314896
I don’t mind stuff like this desu. I feel like “Conceptual” art is what attracts all the pretentious posers and artless hacks.

>>14314001
Lots of good art gets made and talented artists generally don't lack for employment.

The taped banana shit is 90% money laundering and 10% rich people with a weird hobby.

>>14314985
Money laundering tends to happen more with uncontroversial works of art. The banana thing is probably more likely rich people with weird hobbies

Marcel Duchamp claims that reading Max Stirner's 'The Ego and Its Own' was a major turning point for him. Before then he had been making some visually interesting cubist/futurist works that for their time were quite controversial. After that book is when he started with Dada and the toilet readymade was introduced.

I personally see this as perhaps the first point of decline in art, possibly something we've never recovered from and have gradually slipped lower and lower since.

>>14315308
>possibly something we've never recovered from and have gradually slipped lower and lower since

I agree with you. I think it has to do with the inevitable march left, Progressivism, etc., that seeks to "progress" more and more until it is doing nothing but destroying in its own name. In practice everyone seems to hate it and find unhappiness in the modern world but no one seems to have the balls to even speak up. Shitting on art seems to be a sign that all faith in one's own culture has been lost.

>>14315308
Compare this with his earlier works. Perhaps the art world would have taken a different path had he not read that book, or if western culture had never taken a turn into anti-bourgeois, the rejection of logic, and an emphasis on irrationality and absurdism.

>>14315308
>Stirner singlehandedly despooked the Art World from beyond the grave
based

>>14315308
>possibly something we've never recovered from
You can't recover from a cultural event. You can't recover virginity, you can't recover the world from before christianity, French revolution, Marx, Einstein, etc. Culture doesn't have an undo button.
>and have gradually slipped lower and lower since.
We haven't and can't. OP pic is literally just recycling Duchamp, the most radical artists can't move on beyond (lower) than the Fountain. Maybe performance art did, by denying the materiality of the artwork, but that's honestly not such a massive step, especially if we treat it as a sort of theater. Anyway, the avantgarde obsession is pretty passe in most of the world, and some new and productive (though not entirely defined and also not suitable for attention-grabbing headlines) paradigms have slowly been rising in the last few decades.

>>14315352
>no one seems to have the balls to even speak up.
What the fuck are you talking about here man, literally everybody today is unhappy with how things are and everyone is making their lives revolve around complaining about it.

>>14314001
>>14314020
What books destroy these poseurs?

>>14315428
Nice take and good post.
>some new and productive (though not entirely defined and also not suitable for attention-grabbing headlines) paradigms have slowly been rising
Could you give some examples?

>>14314001
>>14314020
This has to be money laundering

>>14315446
Agreed

>>14314212
reminds me of The Square

>>14315445
As I said, they're not entirely definied, it's more of a very wide and vague movement to a different sensibility and way of thinking, away from the aggression and big statements of the avantgarde. It's not just something in visual arts, I see it in other art forms, but anyway I have mentioned a more specific change here >>14314505 (movement of younger artists back towards realism) and posted some pics that I liked >>14314837 and below that. This is not a clear-cut shift, and I don't see it easily taking hold in USA culture right now for multiple reasons (paralysing obsession with politics, raging capitalism, bad education, and cultural rootlessness and myopia), but I do think it exists, elsewhere at least. (But maybe US isn't that bad in reality and I built this picture off possibly exaggerated complaining that I read on 4chan and news.) Look at places that media doesn't tell you to look at, basically. Everyday artistic practice needs a normal, functioning body (mechanism), that the avantgarde never truly dissolved (though it did affect it in interesting ways).

>>14314953
Forgot to post it earlier, here's the second part of the diptych

>>14314975
Well of course. its always been that way. conceptual artists are just the fags in art school who can't draw. so instead they whore for attention in ways like this. with no real deeper meaning or worth to their art.

>>14314001
I simply do not pay attention to contemporary art. I don't discuss it.

>>14314020
How do they get funding for this fucking shit?

>>14315640
It's probably criminal money >>14315446

>>14315446
>>14315460
>>14315647
Assuming every absurd piece of art that makes the news is money laundering is boomertier reasoning.
120k is a weak amount of cash to necessitate cleaning. If youre going to launder money through art youre going to buy some boring period piece thats been out for years already and can be written down as a transaction between private collections. Youre not gunna bid on a duct tape banana making news headlines.

>muh pedophile money laundering
You can explain the retardation of the art market without having to resort to conspiracy theories. It's all speculation - buy a piece of art for a low price from a nobody, spread the word that he's a genius, and then sell the art for more than you paid for. Once the artist becomes famous enough to start selling his stuff at exorbitant prices, you say that he's passe and move on to the next guy. The more outrageous or incoherent the art is, the easier it is to spin. It's soulless, cynical, and destructive buts it's all legal - and that's why they do it.

>>14314180
Because the shit being pulled barely registers in the grand scale of art production in this century. Who knows why someone made a news article about it but it is not at all representative of contemporary art practice in a holistic sense.

>>14314399
Ironically this is the point of the piece.

>>14314656
Believe me, every work that held beauty in privilege produced before the 'break with tradition' had an invisible and inexhaustable wall of text justifying how beauty is the purpose of art accompanying it.

>>14314709
This is basically it -- art theory isn't held to account.

>>14315308
Keep in mind that this 'decline in art' must bridge the discontinuities between the intended exhibition for Fountain (in which it was not allowed to take part) and the couple decades when Duchamp was out of fashion in favour of academic Greenberg formalism and only rediscovered by artists (not critics) in the 50s.

>>14315428
>OP pic is literally just recycling Duchamp

Not really. OP pic is a comment, as it says, on assigning value to objects arbitrarily. Duchamp however did actually consider where art could be found in objects that are almost invisible to us because they are so well-designed.

>>14314001
Great thread, I will give my input with a story:

When I was a teenager, my older sister was a senior at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, which in the Boston area is considered one of the best art schools in the region. With the free museum passes we got with her student ID, we went for a day and explored the Museum or Fine Arts together. I remember entering an empty gallery where the only art in the room was a series of machined planks. Wood, finely sanded and polished into nothing but what seemed to be the side dimension of a dresser drawer, scattered across the room in random places. I got angry.

My older sister worked extremely hard to forge her talent, and even from a young age it was incredible to watch her process. From the time she was a toddler she’d spend hour scribbling away with crayons at her miniature desk, and by the time she was in fourth grade, she went twice per week after school to her mentor’s house for practice, and she loved every second of it, often calling our mother and asking to spend a couple more hours with her teacher Rhoda, a kind older lady who used to be a high school art teacher. She would come home with these intricate detail drawings of human hands, and soon it was faces in every expression. I watched her improvement with these hundreds of sheets, month after month, year after year as what she poured from her mind onto the canvas became more and more lifelike, more expressive, and with a greater strength of character. Wether it was watercolor, oil, pastel, graphite, charcoal, anything, my sister has this incredible gift to perceive render anything she wants. But it didn’t get there overnight. She worked her way into mastery. Growing up with this artist, stepping over her supplies and walking under her framed work on the walls of our home gave me a true appreciation for that creative process which is very much built with great concentration over a lifetime.

I remember being a teenager and looking at those planks, and how angry it made me feel. I complained about it and how terrible it was, and I looked over to my sister as she stared at them too. There was this air of quiet resignation about her, in the sense that she knew better, that she was better than the work laid out in front of her. It did not phase her. Later that day we got lunch together and I asked her about the planks and what she thought of them.

“Anon, those were brags. They were items created by an established artist who built a career on intricate and skillful work, until they got to the point of self-sustainment. It’s an ‘I made it,’ a brag. Ignore it, focus on your own art, and don’t take these people so seriously.”

To this day, I’m not so sure I agree with her, because it seems to me that visual art and exclusively visual art is abused in this manner. We have lost our respect of creative skill in favor of the statement, and that to me is a tragedy.

She painted his one at the age of 13.

>>14315966
If youre talking about the banana its made a decent stir. There were lines of people to look at it. It ended up causing so many problems that the art gallery took it down saturday. Then some guy came in and wrote this on the wall in the blank spot it had been previously displayed.
Id say its certainly in the zeitgeist.

>>14316003
Duchamp's intent was to question "what is art?" That isnt a far cry from what Cattelan was intending.

>>14316044
'What is art' has been the question of art since it had the word assigned to it.

>>14316078
Sure, and that just adds to the validity of the point that the op of this string of comments was making: Its derivative bullshit. Even the guy who ate the banana isnt unique, as plenty of 'performance artists' have tried to piss in public displays of Duchamp's fountain.

so is art unironically degenerate now or what's the consensus here

>>14314171
He is. He didn’t like the ‘art’ and jokingly said ‘this is called ‘hungry artist’’

>le money laundering
This isn't how money laundering works. Conventional money laundering is so easy and foolproof that nobody in their right mind is going to use high profile easily traceable transactions like this to launder money. It will always be better to buy a cash rich business and layers thousands of small untraceable amounts into the accounts.
Doing it with huge one off transactions is insane and how you get caught.

Materialists have never made good artists. That's why Marxism has always been creatively bankrupt.

In a way, pieces like this banana are perfect representations of what a wasteland the West has become. This is exactly what we deserve.

>>14315640
money laundering

if it's not an oil painting of a boat or a landscape it is NOT art!!

Maybe the real art was the potassium we ingested along the way.

>>14316132
I dont disagree that the ones in this thread sperging about money laundering are retarded, but art is a pretty good way to move large amounts of cash if you were a drug lord or something. A work of art valued at several million can be shipped across borders in a box with a label of 'painting: $100' and mostly customs will just rubberstamp it through.

>>14316144
Modern art is a money laundering and tax evasion scheme. The more you know.

>>14316163
>art is a pretty good way to move large amounts of cash if you were a drug lord or something.
This is true, and the Chinese upper classes have been doing it, but to buy that art you need to have laundered the money first. 120k in dollar bills in a briefcase is as good as handing yourself in to the feds.
This notion that the artist just hands 99% back to you is idiotic and wouldn't even get past the taxman, let alone the feds, who know you are a gangster, and are actively trying to catch you laundering money.

>>14316100
Thousands of Jesus pictures are derivative as well you know. 'Originality' in art is a meme, don't fall for it.

Modern art is kino

Middle-class plebs just can't handle the fact that they don't get it.

>>14314837
>>14314849
>>14314857
>>14314887
>>14314896
still waiting

>>14316006
This made me weirdly sad. The fact that even such art as a "brag" seemed normal to her shows that something is wrong in the art world. Sure artists have probably always been dicks, but in the past none would have done something do brazen as exhibiting trash to brag about how successful they are.

>>14314001
the true contemporary art were the friends we made along the way all along

There's quite good art nowadays you just have to look further. But even back in the day most art was shite and not very innovative. It takes decades before the public actually starts recognizing artists at all or even longer. Art is and will always be something for the upper class, it only disseminates and spreads out to all areas of culture when it becomes public in museums. Not sure what's hard to understand, we as a culture do love le banana shit but you must understand at Art basel there's a lot of good art being shown.

Here are artists I like who are contemporary and all currently showing in galleries around the world.

Andy Dixon
Lenz Geerk
Igor Moritz
Kate Barbie
Guglielmo Castelli
Peter Doig

I am an artist as well so I felt very hopeless at the beginning of my career as theres so much shite I didn't even think good artists had a chance at first but you realize they're out there the more in the know you are. Trust me in the 19th and 18th century there was plenty of "soulless" garbage, they just had greater technical proficiency because they were required to undergo extensive training and education as well as be in a guild of some kind or risk being an outcast.

>>14314080
when this episode came out we had been already putting toilets and dildos in museums for over a hundred years, this is not new and it was not new for your grandpa either

isn't contemporary art just shitposting in real life?

>>14314397
lmao, is there anybody in the world more establishment than Banksy? how can you be considered edgy and have the exact same opinions as Angela Merkel and Macron at this point?

>>14314020
This is hilarious

>>14315640
Are you telling me you can't afford a banana and a roll of duct tape?

>>14314001
>...we are just witnessing the natural evolution of artistic endeavor?
Yes, if by 'artistic endeavor' you mean 'money laundering'.

>>14315673
>Assuming every absurd piece of art that makes the news is money laundering is boomertier reasoning.
A boomer would be the exact type of person to not think about money laundering. They are the most guileless generation in human history and lap up any bullshit thrown to them. Congrats on outing yourself as a boomer.

>>14315684
> money laundering is a 'conspiracy theory'
Holy cow, get a load of this idiot.

>>14316424
Essentially, yeah. Art used to tied to religiosity but the upper classes stopped believing in God. After many attempts they gave up on establishing any consistent notion of beauty. Now art is nothing more than novelty.

>>14314171
>I didn't realize this guy was an artist himself. That kind of sucks. I thought he was just some guy who decided to eat the banana.

It's no different to when Björn Kjelltoft pissed in Duchamp's "Fountain" (urinal).

>>14314001
all these "smear of shit sold for 300k$" seem like plain and obvious money laundering to me.

>NOOOOOOOOOOOOO MODERN ART ISN'T REAL ART!!!
>LOOK AT THIS 18TH CENTURY PICTURE OF A WOMAN STANDING IN A FIELD THIS IS WHAT ART IS ABOUT

>>14316515
>>14316483
it's already been explained why you're wrong

>>14316528
>comments above with links that have examples of widespread money laundering in art world versus "no uh ur wrong and pleb, there is absolutely no way this could happen, muh art. muh conspiracy theory. epstein committed suicide. elites are good and never lie"

Hard choice as to who is right.

>>14316582
oh no, it's retarded

>>14314837
why can't all art just be this kind of imagery
none of these bullshit abstract faggotry
just simple, plain, depictions of beautiful (or ugly) landscapes or people

>>14316736
Some people want to make stuff that isn't like that and other people want to look at it

>>14316582
If you read the article youd know its about trafficing older works that arent in the public eye. And absurd shit performance art meant to garner twitter buzz doesnt have much to do with it.

>>14314001
hm i have $120,000 of dirty money. how can i legitimize this large sum of cash in a way that no one will wonder why this large sum is changing hands and moving around

>>14316893
You arent even the 10th faggot to come to that conclusion

>>14314001
>"TWILIGHT OF ART.— Just as in an old age one remembers one’s youth and celebrates festivals of remembrance, so will mankind soon stand in relation to art: it will be a moving recollection of the joys of youth. Perhaps art has never before been comprehended so profoundly or with so much feeling as it is now, when the magic of death seems to play around it. Recall that Greek city in south Italy which on one day of the year continued to celebrate their Greek festival and did so with tears and sadness at the fact that foreign barbarism was triumphing more and more over the customs they had brought with them; it is to be doubted whether the Hellenic has ever been so greatly savored, or its golden nectar imbibed with so much relish, as it was among these declining Hellenes. The artist will soon be regarded as a glorious relic, and we shall bestow upon him, as a marvelous stranger upon whose strength and beauty the happiness of former ages depended, honors such as we do not grant to others of our own kind. The best in us has perhaps been inherited from the sensibilities of earlier ages to which we hardly any longer have access by direct paths; the sun has already set, but the sky of our life still glows with its light, even though we no longer see it."