Student eats world-famous work of art: ‘I was hungry’
Last week, I had a heated discussion about the phenomenon of ‘art’. I definitely have an opinion on it. In short: who decides that something is art? And who decides that a particular work of art is worth so much? Take this work of art, for example, which was hanging in the Leeum Museum of Art in South Korea and has now been eaten.
You generally don’t eat art, you’d think — but generally, art isn’t a banana stuck to the wall with duct tape either.
Most expensive snack ever?
The ‘inventor’ of this ‘work of art’ is Maurizio Cattelan, who managed to sell it for $150,000 at an art fair in Miami in 2018. Just to make my first statement perfectly clear: the art world has gone completely mad. $150K for a banana that you can throw away after a week? Why did this Cattelan choose a banana, which, to me at least, is the fastest-rotting fruit in existence?
A complete scam, and I am therefore convinced that this is the case in a large part of the art world. Why is that, you may be wondering? Well, if this banana is bought for $150,000, the buyer could, for example, donate it to — let’s say — the Leeum Museum of Art, and donations can be deducted from your taxes. In this case, they could therefore deduct $150,000 from their taxes for a banana, because that is suddenly the insane value assigned to it.
‘I was hungry’
So my opinion is that you can’t blame the hungry student who was wandering around the Leeum Museum of Art. He was simply hungry, saw a banana hanging there, and thought: ‘hey, free snack,’ and ate it. Yes, this really happened last week. The student in question was considerate enough to leave the peel hanging; a sad remnant of this ridiculously expensive ‘work of art’.
But don’t worry: the banana was going to be replaced every week anyway, because otherwise it would start to rot. Is this now going to become a running gag in that museum, with everyone trying to eat the banana every week? Sounds hilarious to me.
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Image: Leeum Museum of Art
