WSJ:

The art market went bananas over a million-dollar banana.

“Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, sold for $6.2 million at auction Wednesday night.

The piece consists of an ordinary, yellow banana affixed to a white wall with a diagonal piece of silver duct tape. Since Cattelan debuted the work at Art Basel Miami Beach five years ago, what’s become known as the Banana has turned into a viral sensation. It’s attracted crowds, copycats, and even its own cryptocurrency.

The Banana also is reigniting a long-running debate about the value society is willing to place on an everyday object simply because an artist calls it art. (Marcel Duchamp famously kick-started the argument in 1913 when he mounted a bicycle wheel to a stool.)

Perrotin Gallery originally sold Cattelan’s duct-taped banana in an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs, or early prototypes—so five bananas in all—for between $120,000 and $150,000 apiece in 2019. On Wednesday, Sotheby’s in New York estimated its example from this bunch would sell for at least $1 million, but at least seven bidders chased it far higher.

Ultimately it sold to Chinese collector Justin Sun, founder of cryptocurrency platform Tron. He intends to pay for the piece in crypto. After the sale, Sun said he considered the piece to be historic, but he also said he has plans of his own for the Banana: “In the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”

Cattelan, 64, splits his time between Milan and New York and has acted as the art world’s court jester since the 1990s. He is known for creating impish, realistic sculptures that satirize powerful and wealthy institutions including politicians and the Catholic Church. …

To keep a work made of a real banana intact, the artist enlists the work’s owner—who receives a 14-page sheet of instructions that doubles as a certificate of authenticity—to continually refresh the installation by buying their own supply of new bananas and tape. One stipulation is that the banana’s curve should point right, not left. The fruit should also be displayed vertically, not horizontally like a smile, and roughly at eye level.

If someone visiting Sotheby’s preview had tried to rip the Banana off the wall and eat it like artist David Datuna did at one point during its Miami fair debut, Sotheby’s was prepared. Expert David Galperin said, “We have backups.”

Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal, titled “Fountain.” to a New York art exhibition in 1917, 107 years ago. You would think this kind of nihilistic gesture would have gotten old by now.

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“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it.”
“Great bosh.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try to criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Cockburn thinks he has found the key explanation: Western elites let Afghans see what Western elite culture is like. Naturally, and inevitably, they took down their AK-47s from the wall and fought tooth and nail to prevent being assimilated into that!

[A]longside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to U.S. government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.

A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for “gender.” That makes sense, since the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 per cent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in “democracy” created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.

The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a “National Masculinity Alliance”, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their “gender roles” and “examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.”

Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. Even as America built an Afghan army ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.

But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the “nation building” that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.

But instead of rattling off anecdotes, perhaps a single video clip will do the job. Dadaism and conceptual art are of dubious value even in the West, but at some point some person who is not in prison for fraud decided that Afghan women would be uplifted by teaching them about Marcel Duchamp. (See above)

RTWT — Outline.com if you hit the paywall.