Fruits of Labour

NEW DELHI: Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund's Triangle of Sadness (2022), a satirical black comedy and a brilliant send-off of the excesses of capitalism, features an exchange between two characters, on board a luxury cruise, destined for shipwreck. The banter has one character telling the other, "The last capitalist we hang will be the one who sold us the rope," in a reference to Karl Marx. It might be hard to gauge what Marx might have thought of a recent episode involving the purchase of a $6.2 million conceptual work of art, comprising a banana duct-taped to a wall.

What might have baked Marx's noodle is the fact that the cryptocurrency entrepreneur who bought the artefact, ended up consuming the fruit prior in a press conference held in one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels. The art work, titled 'Comedian,' by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, was a sleeper success when it debuted in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach. Back then, festival goers were confused on whether the piece was a joke or a cheeky commentary on questionable standards among art collectors. What was more baffling was that three editions or iterations of this work sold for between $120,000 and $150,000.

The phenomenon of artists training their brushes at the superficiality of consumerism is nothing new. A few years ago, Banksy, the legendary pseudonymous England-based street artist and political activist engaged in the most jaw-dropping example of pranking the gatekeepers of the world of galleries. In October 2018, a Banksy illustration titled the Balloon Girl was sold for 1 million pounds at Sotheby's. As soon as the purchase was confirmed, an inbuilt alarm within the picture frame went off, and the canvas passed through a shredder hidden within the frame, partially shredding the painting.

Prior to Banksy, the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman had commissioned a series of giant floating sculptures of yellow rubber ducks, which appeared in many cities globally. The sculpture found itself in the midst of a political firestorm when in 2013, the Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo blocked the term Big Yellow Duck to deter users from posting digitally altered pictures of the sculpture in front of the Tank Man, a Chinese national, who stood before a column of tanks during the student led demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989, a heavily censored subject in China.

Pranksters are only one side of the coin, as we also have the provocateurs, whose works are meant to shake us out of our collective stupor and sledgehammer us into awakening. Way back in 1974, Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramovic put together a performance titled Rhythm 0, in which she placed 72 objects on a table for audience members to use on her body for six hours. The objects included a rose, feather, honey, whip, olive oil, scissors, scalpel, gun, and a bullet.

The audiences were informed that they could use the objects as they wanted and would not be held responsible for their actions. What started as a passive engagement slowly devolved into anarchy as the audiences turned brutal. By the end of the performance, the artist had been attacked and stripped. The experiment was aimed at showcasing how people could be transformed when their actions wouldn’t entail social consequences. Unreasonable valuations and pretensions aside, let’s not forget — the function of art is to comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable.