The World Needs Your Banana - Guest Post By Quincy Alastair Cook
Someone bought a banana duct-taped to a wall for $120k.
Allow me to repeat that: someone bought a banana duct-taped to a wall for $120k.
I recognize this is somewhat old news (it happened just about a year ago), but this is a story whose implications are still rippling through the art world, especially after a year of a pandemic-fueled lockdown. Somebody had the audacity to take a banana, a blank wall, and $0.05 worth of gray duct-tape and put the three together in the most straightforward way possible.
The responses have been all over the board, as one could expect:
"That's not art!"
"It's so uninspired. I could do that!"
"So much for my Raspberry Glued to a Door idea."
...okay. That last one was mine. But, your initial response may have well been similar to the other quotes. And yet, someone bought it for $120,000. That is more than most people in the United States make in a year. What can you say to that? You could certainly argue to the laziness of the artist. It is not like he spent countless hours selecting a perfectly shaped banana or painted the wall as some kind of backdrop. Heck, he didn't even select a pattern of duct-tape beyond basic gray. By all accounts, he spent as much time making the art as most of take brushing our teeth.
You could argue about the intellect of the buyer. After all, it's a rotting piece of fruit, some tape, and a partial wall. Cattelan, the artist, probably spent no more than $25-$30 on a trip to WalMart, gas included. Why would ANYONE pay six figures for a bad ad for Chiquita bananas?
If you're thinking these things, though, I challenge you to reframe this and look beyond the arguments to the lesson here. As creators of art and producers of the written word, both fiction and non-fiction, "Comedian" (the name of the piece) is an flash of hope.
Somebody wants your banana.
Somebody, somewhere in the world, will read your work and say to themselves, "Yes! I love this! This is exactly what I have been wanting to read!"
I'm not suggesting that you should just throw some words to the page and expect glory. Nor am I suggesting that a $120,000 payday is around the corner for your work, although the potential is always there. What I am suggesting is to keep at your craft, YOUR work, and thumb your nose at anyone who tells you your art isn't good enough.
For a number of years I have been vapor-locked with writer's block because I thought my work was somehow not good enough. I'd write six words on a page and then erase them. I'd be consumed by the absolute knowledge that I wasn't producing the best prose ever written. Not even the best of the year. My stories would remain unwritten because I'd think, "This story doesn't have enough social metaphor," or "How is this going to really SPEAK to people."
It's a ridiculous amount of pressure to try to please a faceless audience who scoff at a piece of artwork that obviously spoke to someone on an emotional level. Don't worry about gatekeepers. Just write your banana and gift it to your waiting audience. They will find it.