Maculate Conception Redux - by Noah Millman

There’s something sublime about a crypto entrepreneur—someone who made their fortune manipulating the tokens of a purely conceptual currency— purchasing Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual art piece, “Comedian,” for $6.2 million. I haven’t checked, but I feel comfortable asserting that this is the highest price ever paid for instructions on taping a banana to a wall with a piece of duct tape. Of course, since anyone could duct tape a banana to a wall without paying a cent (to be fair, you’d have to pay $0.35 for the banana and let’s say $5.00 for a decent roll of duct tape), what Justin Sun really paid for was the bragging rights for having spent that much on a joke. Cattelan might think the joke is on the buyer, but I suspect the joke is on us.

I don’t have much else to say about this, because I’ve already said it before. So instead of saying it again in new words, I’m going to re-post the old ones: a piece from three years ago about the poverty of conceptual art and the insanity of the art market that references Cattelan’s piece (along with Damien Hirst and others), but the bulk of which is about Jasper Johns, who is, among other things, a conceptual artist, but one whose work I loved and still love.

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