What does it imply to eat your artwork? On November 20, cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Solar purchased Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comic” — famously, a banana duct-taped to a wall, to get replaced as every one rots — for $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s public sale. As my colleague Valentina Di Liscia reported, Solar despatched out an electronic mail blast stating that he plans to “personally eat the banana” as “a part of this distinctive creative expertise.”
Solar presumably sees consuming the banana as radical, however others may argue that the true radical — even revolutionary — act can be losing a 49-cent banana for which you overpaid by greater than $6 million. Both manner, consuming the banana doesn’t make the artwork go away. Simply ask Piero Manzoni. It merely turns into a pile of shit.
In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Construction of Fascism,” Georges Bataille posited heterogeneous social existence as regarding “components that are unattainable to assimilate,” that’s, that which exists for itself and should be expelled from the State to ensure that it to operate as a homogenous sphere. In accordance with Bataille, “the heterogeneous world contains the whole lot ensuing from unproductive expenditure,” amongst this “the waste merchandise of the human physique,” but the sacred should be labeled as heterogeneous alongside human waste as a result of figures akin to “kings or witch medical doctors” are by definition set off from the social sphere. This creates a correspondence between profanation and divination of their mutual expulsion from the digestive observe of the socius.
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Manzoni’s 1961 a number of “Artist’s Shit” raised shit to a better stage by sealing it in a tin can and presenting it as artwork however Bataille’s essay goes additional by suggesting that the sacred inheres in shit. “Artist’s Shit,” in addition to works like Mike Kelley’s Rubbish Drawings sequence (1988) or GG Allin’s performative defecation and Allin’s inspiration, the pre-Columbian Codex Vaticanus B, as an example, are expressions of the divine otherness of the profane. On the similar time, heterogeneous matter performs an important function within the operations of the State via its essential expulsion.
In itself, Cattelan’s “Comic” is homogenous matter, not more than a functionary of the State Equipment perpetuating an exploitative capitalist system, regardless of the seductively subversive sourcing of artwork supplies from a Greenback Tree on Staten Island close to the previous Wu Put on retailer. Solar’s function on this “distinctive creative expertise” has been referred to as controversial and cynical, however in mild of Bataille’s theoretical findings, consuming the banana has the potential to alter the whole lot.
If Solar’s plan is to interact his physique as a processing plant to make shit multiples to promote on the New Museum when it reopens subsequent 12 months, utilizing the proceeds to plant banana timber to be harvested ethically by circus monkeys who can’t curler skate, after which donating the bananas to underfunded faculties for lunches, possibly all of us owe him an apology.