Let Them Eat: A Comedian among Bored Apes
The Mon(k)ey Business and the Value of Value
Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—a banana duct-taped to a wall—captures global attention once again as it headed to Sotheby’s Contemporary Auction in New York on November 20, 2024, and fetched $6.2 million. This seemingly mundane and perishable artwork serves as both a stark reflection of our current moment and a satire of contemporary art’s commodification. As financial instability, environmental threats, and social divisions loom, its presence on the auction block raises essential questions about the very concept of value in an age defined by hyperreal perception.
The (art) world today sits at the intersection of profound cultural shifts. We have moved from modernism, with its focus on intrinsic value, through postmodernism, characterized by skepticism, deconstruction, and cultural symbols—into what many now call metamodernism. This framework navigates between these extremes, oscillating between sincerity and irony as it attempts to capture the complex layers of meaning in a fragmented world.
Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in the contemporary art market, where Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—sold for $120(K) at Art Basel in 2019 and resold on the secondary market for over 6 million dollars (2024)—becomes both an object of satire and an emblem of the speculative financial culture that dominates the world.
In a sense, Comedian reflects this metamodern irony, serving as a critique of capitalism while simultaneously existing as a high-value commodity within it. It mocks the absurdity of wealth and status yet is itself a product of those very forces. This dual nature captures the metamodernist impulse to both embrace and critique, to recognize the contradictions of our time and hold them in tension. Ultimately, it points us toward deeper questions about how we perceive and assign value in today’s economy, with its conflicting layers.
The capitalist system has struggled to integrate these evolving layers of value. Some remain rooted in modernist principles, expecting stability and intrinsic worth (such as a banana worth 30 cents), while others embrace postmodern value systems, where branding and image inject worth. Still others engage with the metamodern fusion of sincerity and irony through speculative worth epitomized by Maurizio Cattelan’s banana taped to the wall.
These three economic models, though existing side by side in our world, reveal the unsustainability of such a fragmented value system. The tension between tangible worth, cultural symbolism, and speculative value creates an unstable structure that resists integration. Each system, while interacting in the marketplace, highlights the contradictions at the heart of contemporary financial culture. As these models compete for legitimacy, they pull us in different directions, underscoring the precariousness of our current economic moment and the inevitable clash between values and speculative paradigms.
This dissonance is reflected in the conflation of concepts—money, currency, value, and price—that we treat interchangeably, even though they are distinct. Money and currency differ in function, value extends beyond price, and price itself is manipulated by supply and demand rather than any intrinsic metric. While value based on perception is not inherently negative, it becomes problematic when intertwined with money as a solid foundation. When we conflate these terms, we feed an illusory financial structure detached from real-world anchors, creating volatility and uncertainty—an economy that is both susceptible to shocks and difficult to regulate effectively. This erosion of clarity fosters a sense of uncertainty, where the foundations of value seem to shift constantly, leaving us with a system that feels both boundless and dangerously unmoored.
For the ultra-wealthy, buying an artwork like Comedian is not necessarily about fostering cultural or aesthetic value or supporting the artist. Instead, it is a tool for capital movement, financial gains, and the status it confers. Genuine collectors, by contrast, preserve art for its cultural legacy and immeasurable significance—value untethered from monetary return. An artist’s work essentially exists within a non-market form, rooted in intrinsic value rather than commercial worth. It is only assigned financial equivalence when introduced into the market by dealers and speculators under the current framework.
Mirroring financial market dynamics, the contemporary art world has created a speculative secondary layer. Here, the artist is excluded from the profits generated through resale and auctions. This secondary market transforms the artist’s work and worth into a speculative asset—a perceived value deliberately constructed within the market’s speculative framework. We can easily imagine that 90% of artworks collected today could potentially perish, losing their monetary equivalence overnight and being distilled to their cultural essence.
This phenomenon parallels the rise and fall of NFTs, exemplified by projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which saw prices soar before abruptly crashing. Comedian functions much like an NFT, acting as a certificate of authenticity and embodying the non-fungible aspect of the art piece due to its perishable nature. Similarly, NFTs represent contracts of ownership on a blockchain linked to digital images. Both Comedian and NFTs are not tangible objects in the traditional sense; they serve more as symbols of ownership and status.
Many cryptocurrencies and NFT projects begin with high-minded goals, aiming to create new frameworks for economic value, social dynamics, and digital ownership. However, as financial speculation surrounding these assets and cryptocurrencies intensified, a darker side emerged: their value proved alarmingly volatile, often detached from any enduring or tangible foundation, and hijacked by individuals seeking immediate profit, driven by a scarcity mindset rooted in the anxiety of missing out on potential gains—an endless need for accumulation.
This same illusion permeates the financial markets, where traditional fiat currencies, untethered from tangible assets like gold, now exist mainly as digital figures. These numbers fuel extensive derivative financial products, further reinforcing the disconnect between financial symbols and real-world value. Banks, for example, through fractional reserve banking, can leverage a small deposit multiple times over via complex lending mechanisms, effectively creating money “out of thin air.” This system allows banks to operate much like art speculators, leveraging money supplies in secondary markets for greater returns. Meanwhile, the average depositor views their money as primary, limited to its face value, while institutions profit from speculative financial alchemy.
Ultimately, Comedian highlights a deeper societal issue: when money is made from money alone, it embodies what D.H. Lawrence called “our madness, our vast collective madness.” In essence, we are left with a speculative economy that mirrors Cattelan’s banana—a fragile construct held together by duct tape, vulnerable to the whims of perception and faith in future buyers. Rather than fostering stability and intrinsic value, we have built an economy based on an endless cycle of acquisition and liquidation.
The metamodernist is ultimately proudly apolitical, feeding the wheels of consumption to an elevated revolution to bring art beyond the end of art, fashion beyond the end of fashion, politics beyond the end of politics, media beyond the end of media, and capitalism beyond the end of capitalism. Considering today’s broader cultural and economic climate—marked by increasing frustration over political divides, wealth disparity, climate crises, wars, and social injustice—one could argue that Comedian acts as a modern omen, potentially signaling an impending shift or revolution in values and priorities, as approximately 90% of speculative and derivative worth in our economy is constructed through complex layers and owned by a mere 5 to 10% of the population.
As we edge closer to what could be a financial reset, the demand for new paradigms grows, along with a reevaluation of value. We might envision a world transformed: one where the drive to make money from money fades, giving way to a society of creators rather than consumers, where value flows from genuine contributions and project-backed currencies, rather than speculation for its own sake. In such a world, the focus shifts from a scarcity mindset to cultivating prosperity, and the very concept of hoarding “zeros after the one” as a marker of wealth becomes hollow.