Łukasz Białkowski
THE ACTIVENESS OF THE AUDIENCE AND THE VALUE OF AN ARTWORK. A FEW OBSERVATIONS ON ART INSTALLATIONS PRIVATISING THE CUMULATED WORK OF VIEWERS

Il. Jan Mioduszewski

No ideas but in things.

W.C. Williams

A ban(an)al object and its work

There is no doubt that Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian is a hybrid work. The fact that it comprises three separate items, or that it actually exists in three copies, is not the only reason for that.¹ Its hybridity results mostly from it not being a genuine object. It exists in photographs depicting a banana duck‑taped to a white wall that have been sweeping social media and international news outlets on a regular basis since 2019. The piece is therefore, more than anything else, a project stretched over time or a meme – both in the original and colloquial sense of the word² – that only occasionally assumes the form of a physical object. By no means is Comedian different in this respect from a great deal of iconic artworks that also carry on as copies or have fired collective imagination as photographic reproductions. A conglomeration of ephemera (each time there is a different banana, a different tape and a different wall), dooming the piece to an existence primarily as an online image, it clearly exposes the virtual nature of the undertaking that contemporary art has become.

Yet the evanescence is dictated not only by the biological decomposition of bananas and the mechanical damage to the tape and the wall. Art conservators can work miracles, and if the owners of Comedian could pay exorbitant prices for each copy of the installation,³ they surely have sufficient means to stop the putrefaction and preserve the version of Comedian originally purchased.⁴ But the point is not to conserve the bananas – or the pieces of duct tape fastening them to the wall – but to keep replacing them. This was perfectly illustrated by the actions performed by two men usually described as artists or performers by the media, but also as provocateurs. The first to take the banana off the wall and eat it was David Datuna, a recently deceased Georgian artist who committed the act in November 2019, during the art fair when Comedian was sold. He saw it as a performance piece and gave it the title Hungry Artist; he stated: “Any meaningful interaction with an object could turn it to art. I am a hungry artist, and I am hungry for new interactions.”⁵ The other man was Noh Hyun‑soo, a Korean art student who ate the banana in April 2023 during an exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art in South Korea; his justification for the deed was that he had been hungry and besides, the destruction a work of art could, too, be considered art.⁶

Not only did these acts of “vandalism” increase the recognisabili­ty of their perpetrators,⁷ they also spotlighted the constant replacement of bananas and duct tape. In both cases, new elements were immediately added to the installation, and the Korean audience was also given the chance to learn that the banana was replaced every two or three days.⁸ It seems noteworthy that neither man was held accountable. When informed of the incident in Seoul, Maurizio Cattelan’s alleged reply was simple: “No problem.”⁹ Immediately after Datuna’s stunt, the spokesperson for the gallery Perrotin, representing the Italian artist, released a statement saying that he “did not destroy the art work” because… “[t]he banana is the idea.”¹⁰ That a particular fruit could be replaced by another was eventually demonstrated by Justin Sun. On 20 November 2024, he paid over $6 million for the rights to one of three copies of Comedian at a Sotheby’s auction only to ostentatiously eat a banana, by implication – the same banana that had been given to him together with the duct tape as part of the transaction, in front of international media a few days later. The footage of Justin Sun eating the banana was massively popular with over 17 million views on the BBC News YouTube channel alone.¹¹

Symptomatically, each episode of this soap opera steered attention towards the meagre value of the fruit and the tape when compared to the market price of the installation. The fact was underlined by the media which took it literally when Maurizio Cattelan stated that he had bought the banana in a shop right by the Miami Beach Convention Center and they reckoned he must have spent around 30 cents on it.¹² In 2019, David Datuna also foregrounded the low price of the banana,¹³ and in 2024, Sotheby’s published an official note informing about the lot which stated that the Italian artist “single handedly prompted the world to reconsider how we define art.”¹⁴ When artworks sold for millions of dollars no longer hold much interest for the media, it is the disproportion between the price of an ordinary, one is tempted to say: ban(an)al, food product and the value of the installation of which it constitutes a part, rather than the price of the whole piece, that has become the driving force behind the marketing and media hype about the artwork. It turned out that the banana was not a Platonic entity but a real object, and what truly bore relevance was its substitutability caused by its low price and “mobility” – a structure able to become a centre of attention and generate media buzz. The banana was therefore an object constantly at work, as was the whole installation and all the people “managing” it in all kinds of ways. Not only a constituent of an installation with a hybrid nature, it was also the object of hybrid work – performed by many entities – that translated into the value of this installation.

A work that is not visible?

Reading Comedian as a pars pro toto to a great number of the art pieces that we call contemporary art, I am going to present some observations relating to work and its role in the generation of the symbolic and economic value of an artwork in what follows. It might be a good idea to begin with the ambiguity of the very term “work” whose meaning within the context of contemporary art is twofold. While it functions as a synonym for “art piece,” it can also denote the very process of making that piece. The specificity of contemporary artistic activity means that even though both meanings tend to be related, they can many a time turn out to be mutually contradictory. A massive expenditure of effort does not necessarily result in an art piece of value, or conversely, a valuable work may spring from a simple and spontaneous gesture or minimal exertion on the part of the artist, in comparison with those to whom the actual production of the piece has been delegated. In this way, artistic work would in fact be a lack of work and, in this sense, it would constitute the fulfilment of (or would be close to fulfilling) Guy Debord’s postulate which he wrote on Parisian walls in the 1950s: “Ne travaillez jamais!” (Never work!).

In other words, contemporary art seems to be turning the labour theory of value on its head. Let us briefly recap it – in the simplest of terms: there is a certain objective and measurable value of a product that results from the amount of labour necessary to produce it and from the value of the tools used to create it, or from how much effort it can save for its purchaser.¹⁵ In this sense, the value of every product comes from it being the cumulative value of various factors. Although an early version of the labour theory of value can be found in the work of the founding father of liberalism, Adam Smith,¹⁶ it is now associated primarily with Karl Marx’s take on it, who used it as the basis of his economic analyses and socio‑political postulates. For reasons of space, the intricacies of the discussion about the relationship between market price, exchange value and use value, or the arguments deployed by its participants for two centuries will not be expounded on here. In view of the question at hand, it should be remembered that the functioning of contemporary art market – at least at first glance – eludes the mechanics postulated by the proponents of the labour theory of value, in the Marxist sense, and provides a powerful argument for its opponents.

It should be noted that this would have been quite impossible several hundred years ago because art was commonly taken to be a craft and perceived through the prism of a well‑entrenched definition of it as “the ability to perform according to rules.”¹⁷ Seeing an artist as a craftsman meant that an artwork could be evaluated according to the criteria that were applied to other goods – the labour, time and resources needed to produce it. This also harmonised perfectly with the concepts of ​​talent and mastery, i.e. the manual skills and technical knowledge necessary to create such a work. A serious crack in this crafty paradigm appeared in the 18th century caused, among others, by the Charles Batteux’s treatise Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle; in his outline of the specificity of fine arts, the author argued that they were useless¹⁸ when compared to other crafts, and satisfied not the first but the “second order of need.”¹⁹ Taste is needed for their evaluation, and taste is not identical to whim or chance, it is to the arts what intelligence is to the sciences, and it is hard to define how it works because, like an impulse of the heart, it “carrie[s] us along almost without our noticing [presque sans nous].”²⁰ A few decades later, Immanuel Kant presented a similar idea, focusing in The Critique of Judgment on the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience and stating that artistic creation is helpless in the face of beauty – it is nature each time that mysteriously guides the creating artist.²¹ Although art as craftsmanship had not yet been completely undermined – skills, expertise and manual labour were still needed to produce a work of art – its value came to be determined by a mysterious and elusive element that evaded the rational and pragmatic balance of profits and losses, neither definable nor tameable by rules, denying the importance of dexterity and work.

Even though the terms “beauty” and “aesthetic value” have long since disappeared from the vocabulary of theorists and critics of contemporary art, this immaterial and elusive element of the assessment of an artwork and its value has survived to this day. We know it as the “idea” to which the 20th century reduced the work of art, bidding a final farewell to craftsmanship and the associated effort as factors determining the value of a piece of art. The various forms taken by this process included gradual appropriation of the outcomes of other people’s work by artists who incorporated them into their own pieces (from Cubists who used postage stamps, tickets or buttons in their paintings, to Marcel Duchamp’s ready‑mades and, later, Land Art that relied on the work of natural forces, to Richard Prince who appropriated advertising photographs), or delegating work to others (which was a vital part of, for instance, happenings, many activities under the umbrella of socially engaged art, interactive multimedia art, delegated performance, but it has also become a standard for artists who outsource the physical implementation of their projects to a wide range of specialists). The symbol of this process is the artistic installation, an invention of 20th‑century art which cumulates all those practices. From the point of view of an artist, it tends to be – just as the banana was for the spokesperson at the Perrotin gallery – merely an idea, to be implemented by someone else.

However, in a society that runs on cognitive economics with round‑the‑clock exchange of ideas and information, that has made it the basis of its economy and lifestyle, that needs information like a fish needs water, and in which information is generated every second by refrigerators and watches, while ideas are created on demand by artificial intelligence, the value of both ideas and information is constantly deflated. It is all the more surprising that an outright artistic – being useless – idea, a banana that can be obtained from any greengrocer’s shop for the equivalent of 30 cents, has fetched over six million dollars. It is easy, when looking for an answer, to take a shortcut and reduce the problem to a well‑known pattern that involves a provocateur – here Maurizio Cattelan – causing a scandal to attract the attention of the media, the public and – most importantly – collectors who grab this cleverly marketed object of desire. It is true that many objects sold at auctions gain value due to effective marketing – non‑fungible tokens sold as works of art which, with the media hype surrounding them, went for very steep prices a few years ago being an excellent example,²² yet explaining the success of Comediant and other artistic installations in this way is oversimplifying. For instance, it fails to clarify why this scheme does not always work, or why the prices of many scandalous works remain high after the media frenzy is over. Above all, however, it overlooks the question of work.

In other words, placing the source of the economic value of an artwork solely in the readiness to spend exorbitant sums of money signalled by eager collectors leads to an exaggeration of the role of the market, while, at the same time, disregards the labour behind that value. For even if for those who see the “invisible hand of the market” behind the banana‑idea’s gaining of absurd economic value the law of supply and demand remains the ultimate explanation ​​(for them, the installation is part of a Maussian potlatch where resources can be squandered at will for whatever reason), an alternative appears in the light of the labour theory of value. Either the space of installations, art fairs and auctions is where miracles happen, where insignificant labour is transformed into a fortune with a wave of a magic wand, or there is unseen labour behind it. Hidden work not necessarily performed by those to whom we ordinarily attribute agency in the creation of an artwork. The first alternative is rejected for obvious reasons, so the thing now is to find the answer to the following question: who actually does the work?

An unwritten agreement and the installation

Given these circumstances, is there a better text to be consulted than one by Boris Groys, an apologist for installation as a form of artistic expression? In his 2009 essay The Politics of Installation, he attempted to clarify the question about the social dimension of exhibiting institutions and the role installation can play within them. He pointed out that the number of “large‑scale exhibitions – biennales, triennales, documentas, manifestas – is constantly growing. In spite of the vast amounts of money and energy invested in these exhibitions, they do not exist primarily for art buyers, but for the public – for an anonymous visitor who will perhaps never buy an artwork.”²³

It is for this reason that Boris Groys insists that, in an era of festivals and with exhibiting institutions enjoying high turnouts, the field of art has ceased to constitute an elite social bubble. Most importantly, these “global tourist streams”²⁴ traversing art museums have considerable political potential. Groys maintains that this is possible because – unlike in the case of more traditional forms of artistic expression, such as at a film screening or a concert, which require a “forward‑directed”²⁵ attention from the audience (focussing on a performer or actors) – an exhibition space is specific in that it offers spectators a chance of taking a closer look at themselves. It allows the audience to get distance and practice self‑reflection. This is due to the fact that artistic installation reigns supreme over contemporary exhibition space, an open space that allows visitors to roam freely and turn their gaze towards any chosen object. The deeply democratic spirit inherent in the installation is not only a result of the mass character of contemporary audience, as Boris Groys claims, but also of the critical reflection that can emerge through contact with this artistic form. And when it seems that the author is about to indicate who is really doing the work in contemporary art, he unexpectedly redirects all his energy into old romantic ruts.

It turns out that the political potential of the audience cannot fully manifest, the masses watching an installation are self‑aware – “they do not constitute any politeia.”²⁶ None other is needed than the artist to create it. It is the artist who, by a decision as sovereign as it is arbitrary, causes the many separate objects that make up an installation to create a coherent whole. Boris Groys poeticises this act of castration perpetrated on the audience by applying – as if to dress the inflicted wounds – medical metaphors and writing that “an individual artwork cannot assert its presence by itself, forcing the viewer to take a look at it. It lacks the vitality, energy, and health to do so. In its origin, it seems, the work of art is sick, helpless; in order to see it, viewers must be brought to it as visitors are brought to a bedridden patient by hospital staff.”²⁷

The artist appears either as a mage, causing the installation to offer “to the fluid, circulating multitudes […] an aura of the here and now,”²⁸ or as an omnipotent Pantocrator who stops the artistic installation from circulating. “Rather, it installs everything that usually circulates: objects, texts, films, etc. At the same time, it changes in a very radical way the role and the function of the exhibition space. The installation operates by means of a symbolic privatization of the public space of an exhibition.”²⁹

The word “privatisation” is the key here. Yet before we move to it, we should note that there are several other elements in this statement that raise serious doubts. By saying that the installation does not circulate, Boris Groys puts emphasis on the fact that the internal stability and coherence of installation elements are “based exclusively on personal sovereign decisions that are not in need of any further explanation or justification.”³⁰ In this way, the installation solidifies in a certain form, distinct from what is external to it, because there is “the distinction between a marked, installation space and an unmarked, public space.”³¹ While it is hard not to agree about the installation being the result of a certain idea, the remaining part of Boris Groys’s statement simply echos the romantic myths which make us believe that art relies on a magical transubstantiation of words into matter. The mysterious powers of the artist create an aura and cause ordinary objects to suddenly become something else: they are no longer just a urinal or a banana. Additionally, this magic happens in a way that is too obvious to require “any further explanation or justification.”

Although Boris Groys invokes the category of aura in an attempt to contextualise his observations within the framework of Walter Benjamin’s thought, he does so in a spirit that is entirely contrary to the latter’s intentions expressed in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Not once, in his depiction of the aura being taken away from an artwork through its technological reproduction, does Walter Benjamin claim that this aura has been created by the artist’s actions or that it has a positive value. Contrarily, he shows that objects not made by man also have an aura, and the emergence of an aura in artworks is in no relation to the will of the creator but is mostly associated with a specific location, the experience of “a distance”³² and the kind of perception that foregrounds the “cult” value of a work of art, not its “exhibition” value. It was precisely in the taking away of the cult value from the image that Walter Benjamin saw the opportunity photography and film could take advantage of; with its aura no longer present, a picture could be made a subject of discussion and criticism.³³ This way of experiencing images, running counter to the bourgeois, elitist expectations for pictures to evoke elation, turns the experience of an image into a prosaic and – most significantly – democratic activity. Walter Benjamin finds a promise in it because, among other things, it does not require the spirit of the artist to be lurking in the background.

However, it is more important that Boris Groys, whenever he points at mass participation in an installation, plays with the myth of the artist’s sovereignty and freedom to make the installation a whole – an object coherent in terms of art and ontology. This is a cause for consternation firstly because of the paternalistic and patronising tone of his characterisation of the creator‑audience relationship, and secondly because the network of dependencies between an institution, the audience, curators, technical staff, administration, the media and many other factors is reduced to a single element – the will of the creator. In other words, it seems that Boris Groys’s verdict too eagerly relies on the myths which the art world continues to maintain.

After all, can we really agree it is the artist’s will that is the sole reason why the installation “installs everything that usually circulates?” Does the creator have sufficient agency to make us believe that these particular bananas, substituted every now and again, are significantly different from the fruit that can be obtained in the museum restaurant or from the greengrocer next door? For Boris Groys, the problem does not go beyond “the distinction between a marked, installation space and an unmarked, public space” – this contrast alone is supposed to suffice. It also continues to remain an idea, and Boris Groys – and many other art critics – forgets that it needs to be “naturalised,” materialised in public space. If components of an installation, which are ordinary objects, are to be distinguished from other ordinary objects around them, the artist’s will is not going to achieve that on its own, some work must be done. Even a most powerful artist will not be able to go it alone. The distinction that Boris Groys writes about is, after all, the result of a certain social contract. For it to be created, the same social consensus must be built that was among the subjects, described in one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, who unanimously agreed that the emperor was not in the nude. Like the people viewing Comedian, they wanted to believe that there was something more beyond the “naked” biomass they were looking at. This unwritten agreement is so strong that even when a child cries out that the emperor is naked, it is still honoured. If an installation exists because of this distinction, then the distinction itself can come about as a result of intensive groundwork that is not carried out by the artist or an abstract history of art, but by critics writing texts, spokespersons for exhibiting institutions, academics or art dealers who bend over backwards to come up with stories to reduce the cognitive dissonance of their customers.

First of all, however, the idea that the installation “does not circulate” seems doubtful. If we take a look at what happens to the constantly eaten banana, we see a continuous, even perverse, circulation to which Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian owes its popularity, and which constitutes an important element of its identity. It goes on regardless of whether the artist likes it or not. The Mona Lisa, depicted in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s many paintings, became “the” painting, an icon of Western European art, only in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to hordes of more or less forgotten writers and art critics whose joint effort generated the symbolic capital of this portrait. The cherry on the cake of his legend was the theft of the painting from the Louvre in 1911 and its “miraculous” return to the collection, events that received wide press coverage.³⁴ Likewise, Comedian became what it is through repeated acts of appropriation and consumption. Just as the Mona Lisa circulated in the Parisian underworld, so Maurizio Cattelan’s installation circulates internationally, making it clear that its key elements – the banana and the duct tape – are not permanently attached. They change their position in space and the media. This does not happen by itself – because there is nothing auratic or magical here – but as a result of some people’s effort, or hybrid work. Starting with the two artists seeking attention and Justin Sun satisfying their metaphorical appetite, to the work performed by the security guards who asked David Datuna to leave the art fair, to the people who fasten a new banana to the wall every few days whenever Comedian is on show. However, the hugest part of this work is done by the audience. It is their effort that keeps the installation in constant motion.

Privatisation of public work

Although the installation exists thanks to constant sustenance by many actors performing constant work, we tend to see it as a result of the private decision taken by an artist to bring it into being. Although Boris Groys claims that the installation involves privatisation of public space, he calls this privatisation symbolic. He uses the term synonymously with the word “metaphor,” assuming that an exhibition space is conventionally subordinated for a certain period of time to one person who decides on its shape. At the same time, however, we observe how this declaratively – or merely metaphorically – separated space actually works, producing symbolic and economic capital. There is nothing symbolic in its privatisation. In a most literal sense, it brings one person to the forefront: its originator who, together with a small group of people – gallery owners, owners of auction houses – seizes the entire prestige and the economic value that derives from it, generated by a wide group of entities.

The notion that the value of an artwork is, in fact, created by the audience is not new. We find it, for example, in Marcel Duchamp’s short speech The Creative Act, delivered in the 1950s, reminding us that the creation of an artwork is a collective action because it is ultimately the audience that determines the value of the work of art, not the artist.³⁵ Nevertheless, Marcel Duchamp paid this compliment to the audience only to focus on the aspect of evaluating the work of art, while disregarding the question of the work that the audience puts into creating its value. Boris Groys’s approach is similar in this respect. Despite arguing that the experience of installation is a mass practice and laying emphasis on the role of the audience, he consistently castrates it. Firstly, when he writes that it cannot become a conscious political entity on its own, and secondly, when he expects it to be satisfied with mere participation in the installation as a certain ephemeral idea proposed by the creator. In doing so, he forgets that this idea bears specific value to the creation of which the audience contributed on both a symbolic and economic level.

An oversight of a similar kind is found in The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade,³⁶ an otherwise interesting and inspiring publication in many ways. Its author John Roberts discusses the changes taking place in 20th‑century art in relation to the phenomenon of deskilling. This mode of production based on automation and repetition reduces the significance of manual skills, while increasing the importance of knowledge and intellectual work. Its progress stimulated by the development of technology, deskilling is a general civilisational trend and it applies practically to every area of human production, which – according to John Roberts – facilitates the building of bridges between the work of artists and that of non‑artists as well as considering these two modes of working, usually viewed as separate, together.³⁷ Although the assumption he starts from is non‑trivial, he ends up making use of all too popular art theoretical tropes. His book basically provides a description of diverse versions of distributed authorship that appeared across the successive decades of the twentieth century,³⁸ and focuses either on the analogies between artistic and non‑artistic work or on how these two modes of work intertwine within artistic practice. Revolving around the figure of the author means that the value of an artwork is perceived as a question of conscious and spontaneous work carried out by artists and non‑artists alike. Hence, even when John Roberts admits that both groups perform unpaid work from time to time,³⁹ the fact that he approaches the issue through the prism of authorship makes it difficult for him to notice the existence of a third party in the game – the audience whose work is not only unpaid but also hidden.⁴⁰

It may be a good idea to illustrate the problem of the hybrid work that accumulates in an artwork from the activity of viewers by citing an example from another field of cultural production, i.e. video games. Their researchers argue that, while, on the one hand, games tend to reflect capitalist phantasms at the level of the world depicted – e.g. career, self‑fulfilment and consumption models,⁴¹ they place, on the other hand, players in the capitalist mode of production, turning them into workers in terms of the very model of playing, i.e. using the commodity that the game is.⁴² These observations apply in particular to massively multiplayer online games, in which crowds of participants perform procedures dictated by the game mechanics. They accumulate resources, exchange them with each other, or earn achievements that give them access to further opportunities offered by the game. This is why Graeme Kirkpatrick, Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen, not unlike other researchers before them, write that “the game world cannot be straightforwardly equated with the technical designs, graphical features and programmed objects that supposedly constitute the game. Rather, what sustains player interest […] is invariably the activity of other players. Players perform the game for each other and in this sense they co‑create it, but their labour is owned by the corporation.”⁴³ Many make “micropayments” to be able to obtain certain improvements or take out a subscription to use a platform that would not exist but for them. In this way, players co‑create communities whose being there is monetised by someone else. The researchers even state that “much of the ‘play’ is not playful at all, on any standard definition, but actually resembles coerced labour. In order to progress in the game – to be useful to other players and thereby get included in guilds, teams, etc. – players need to possess in‑game objects and experience points and these can usually only be obtained by engaging in tedious procedures, sometimes referred to as ‘grinding’ parts of the technical environment.”⁴⁴

Similar assumptions lead David Golumbia to believe that found in games are “extensions of physical economies into our own ideological imaginaries.”⁴⁵ What we have come to refer to as entertainment is often little more than tedious mechanical work carried out on someone else’s behalf and it is – like in a workplace – evaluated on the basis of a player’s performance.

This description is true not only of the activity of gamers, but also of the daily behaviour of many of us on social media. A vulgarised version of the original idealistic notions that underlay the development of the Internet as a space where content could flow freely and communities were created spontaneously, they have become a tool for commercialising the activity of their users. From among the best‑known platforms that emerged in the mid‑noughties in line with these ideas, Wikipedia seems to be the only one to have remained faithful to them, while Facebook, YouTube and their later counterparts, reference them merely superficially, if at all. As a consequence, by posting content, liking, commenting and sharing day in day out, users of these platforms are doing unpaid work for their owners. With few exceptions, such activity does not bring any financial gain to the users although – as in the case of gaming platforms – these sites would not exist were if not for them. It seems that there is an analogous interdependence in the artistic installation and, perhaps, contemporarily, in all art. The value of an artwork is privatised despite its being composed of the activity of many people, largely including the audience. The fact that museums would be empty without visitors not being the only reason. The sterile void of the “white cube” no doubt stimulates the imagination of many an artist – within it their works could resound in their full glory. However, the question arises whether they would gain value – symbolical at first and then economic – without the flow of information actively generated by the audience as they take selfies against artworks, publish them on social media, tag themselves in locations associated with exhibiting institutions, put souvenirs purchased in museums on their fridges and reproductions of artworks they saw there on their walls, discuss the objects they have seen and comment on the absurdly high prices artworks command. The need to constantly engage the audience and use the work they perform is well known to specialists in audience development in its broad sense, who look for tools to arouse its members’ curiosity and encourage them to be active. To spend their time watching content created by exhibiting institutions, reading news and invitations, to devote energy and resources to attending lectures, sessions, meetings with artists, guided tours and openings. In the audience, there are of course artists who devote their time to do work for an institution and for other artists whose careers have taken a more advantageous turn. But above all, none of this would be possible without the work that the audience has done previously to earn a living and from which they pays taxes assigned to the maintaining of, among others, the institutions that show art. Which is also true of hotel and restaurant owners, shopkeepers and a whole range of other entities that provide services to the very audience.

In other words, the value of any artwork is the value of the work of many entities, cumulated in that object. David Galperin, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Art, was therefore only partly right when he stated in a press release regarding Comedian that the public “will finally have a say in deciding its true value.”⁴⁶ He failed to notice that the public had already made its contribution to that value. Because an idea – be it a banana, duct tape, or any other object displayed in an art gallery – never gains an absurdly high value on its own. If the artist’s input was minimal, it had to be supplemented by the effort of others. Nevertheless, this value was greedily privatised, while the fact that it was the sum of collective activity, work done by many, especially the audience, was forgotten or passed over in silence.

In fact, what has happened in contemporary art is not new. As I have already mentioned, the process by which an artwork gains a miraculous value that is inadequate to the effort put into it was observed at least as early as the 18th century. By defining art through its uselessness, Charles Batteux makes the very purchase of it a whimsical waste of resources, and its value depends solely on the caprice of both, the seller and the buyer. When Immanuel Kant defines beauty as a phenomenon unrenderable into the craft of executing an artwork, he also causes the measurement of its value to move into an elusive and indescribable realm. This long tradition of “explaining” the value of an artwork by the inexplicable can also be seen in the narratives concerning Comedian and many other art installations. Their price is to be legitimised by an elusive element that is nevertheless contained in them – ​​the idea. It is usually an idea that is verbalised only with difficulty, as capricious as the buyers themselves. And the vaguer it is, the better because it can more easily obscure the work others are carrying out in the background. Regardless of whether they are peasants cultivating the land in the latifundia of art patrons, workers toiling away in factories owned by founders of museum collections, or tourists pushing their way in front of the Mona Lisa.