Conceptual work created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at auction in New York last week
The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun has fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2m (£4.88m) on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall – by eating the fruit.
At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.
“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun, who was born in China, said after getting his first taste. “It’s really quite good.”
“Entrepreneur.”
Gentle reminder that you cannot make money in crypto unless someone else loses money. It’s not entrepreneurship. At best, it’s scam artistry, at worst fraud or theft.
Wouldn’t that also describe wall street in general?
To some extent. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. Companies are not ephemeral, like crypto, but represent real people doing real work. So the stock market is not a zero-sum game (like musical chairs).
Crypto is fundamentally different. Bitcoins have no utility. They don’t “do” anything (except consume ungodly amounts of power to no discernible end).
Let me put it this way: if Microsoft died tomorrow, some would chortle with secret delight, but the truth is that a lot of our infrastructure would need to be rebuilt from scratch — hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, computer networks, servers, websites, gaming and cloud ecosystems would be decimated. Something like 25% of the internet would be down.
If bitcoin disappeared tomorrow nothing would happen, because bitcoin isn’t real. It does nothing and represents nothing. It’s a distillation of the most purified nothing that ever was. If bitcoin vanished that would be a boost for the environment and a boost for the economy (as people stop pissing away money by buying literal nothing).
Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s
The good old days. Every month I discover a new good regulation that we lost :(
Do you feel the same way about centralized currency’s apparatuses? Visa, MasterCard, Chase, BoA, PayPal, the U.S. Mint, the FBI’s anti-counterfeiting department, point-of-sale terminal manufacturers, etc. These all use so much more resources than all of crypto combined, not to mention the human lives wasted to support it all.
You say that if crypto disappeared, nothing would happen. I posit that if fiat currencys disappeared (and were replaced by a crypto that isn’t energy intensive) that you would have a net improvement to global society. You could hand out lifelong annuity/pension/UBI for all the displaced workers, pay them to dump all the executives/shareholders at the bottom of the ocean, and still have excess money left over. All those former bank tellers would have time to pursue their interests, and maybe produce some music/art/whatever for the rest of us along the way. (Bitcoin and proof-of-work’s energy waste do need to be trashed though.)
Well, fiat currency is just IOU’s, literally. Check out Debt the First 5000 Years for an anthropological look at the origins of money.
So would I prefer to live in a moneyless (i.e., debtless) post-scarcity anarchist utopia? Of course I would! Incidentally, that’s how small tribes and communities were organized for tens of thousands of years before the rise of nations.
Fiat currencies have a few advantages for maintaining a modern marketplace, whose purpose is to allocate scarce resources.
- Personal debt is risky. If I issue an IOU, I might die before I can fulfill that promise. Governments are more permanent, which removes the speculative aspect of currency (at least for most purposes, though Forex trading is a thing).
- A central bank can balance inflation and employment numbers to ameliorate the natural volatility of the market (with good regulation lol).
- Fiat currency can be synchronized with economic productivity, avoiding the deflationary pressure that is anathema to any currency.
A few other things to clear up. Fiat transactions are infinitesimally cheap. I’m not sure whether ordinary transactions are 1000 or 100,000 times cheaper than using crypto, but the difference is gross. Just attempting to acquire crypto can take minutes and costs enormous fees. I know this from experience.
Dollars represent faith in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its population. Crypto represents nothing. It stands for nothing. “Coins” come and go, and if you’re the last one standing in the zero-sum game of musical chairs, you lose your savings. For that to happen with dollars, the US government would have to implode, which is unlikely.
Crypto is, quite possibly, the purest form of speculative trading (gambling) we have ever concocted. The only reason I don’t think it should be illegal is that I have no interest in saving people from their own cupidity and greed.
Tbf, money isn’t real. Blips on a monitor.
Wouldn’t this describe any economy…?
Good point. I agree it would
I’m sure the banana wasn’t what the money was for. It was the cache of weapons and drugs being delivered somewhere.
I mean, that’s capitalism in a nutshell no? Unless you’re a government mint, No one can make money unless someone else loses money.
Currency yes, but value no. In fact that’s part of why you can’t set currency at a set number of dollars per person. If you did that currency would deflate
Depends on what you mean by “money” I guess, but banks create money every day when they give out loans for more money than they actually have.
Yes, if you consider paying for service to be losing money. If you invest in a company and it succeeds, you earn a portion of the money (in exchange to providing some up-front). In theory, this is a win-win-win situation: the investor gets a return, the company gets capital to get things going, customers get a new product/service provider.
That said, things like stock trading, especially high-frequency trading, do seem to function in this way.
Yes, if you invest in a company you initially lose money while the company gains money.
You invest so that eventually you get money back, which means the company pays you back and therefore loses money.
The money the company pays you with is money that the company gained by other people’s such as clients and customers giving them money for their service, and therefore they lose their money which eventually ends up in your pocket as your investment starts to earn you money.
In the end the company and the investor earn money if the company is successful but ultimately the the money comes from the customers who are losing that money.
I only take issue with the phrasing of “losing money” - but if we agree that that’s just semantics (because everybody is getting value for their money), then yeah, I completely agree
People living in the streets, going to bed / waking up hungry, or on the verge of bankruptcy from medical bills. Should I do something about that or should I spend $6.2 million on a banana that was duct-taped to a wall and deemed “art”?
The wrong fucking people have money.
At least he has spent the 6 mill.
I find that better than if he had continued to sit on the money. Somebody else can do better things with it now.
This is just the rich shuffling money between themselves and getting attention for it.
True, good point.
In many cases the people were shitty to begin with. But also having that much money and therefore power is really bad for you brain
It’s easy to say this but why are you buying a video game instead of buying someone food? Why are you driving an expensive car?
Yes there are problems in the world that “can be solved by money” but picking and choosing which transactions are wrong isn’t the way to go about it.
Our economic system doesn’t allocate resources according to need, that’s not the fault of these two individuals. Direct your energy toward changing the system.
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Crypto entrepreneurTurbo douche eats banana art he bought for $6.2mAnd now we know why people should not have that much money. When you can throw away enough money to change thousands of lives for the better the system is broken.
It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $6.2M?
Also, fuck everyone involved in this nonsense.
I wouldn’t blame anyone for selling this as an art piece tbh. If people have too much to throw away? If someone told me I could like glue an apple to a painting and get crazy cash for it I’d do it in an instant
Also, fuck everyone involved in this nonsense.
Except the original seller, who got like $0,32.
There is not a single thing about this that isn’t moronic. Calling the banana art, buying it for millions, or eating it to show off.
Apparently moronic is considered art.It’s wasteful not to eat a free banana. It’s just money laundering
Honestly? Good for him. It was a garbage art piece anyway. It was literally made just to launder money.
Honestly, there are so many things to be mad at Justin Sun for, but this is a tempest in a tea cup.
The artwork itself was intended to be ephemeral. The banana inevitably rots. Eating it is, arguably, participating in the artist’s intent. The work was itself a play on the insanity of the high art world. Buying a piece of art just to destroy it is a perfect way to engage with that.
And the artist got paid. A creative person doing creative work made money in a world where so much creativity is being ground down to dust or offloaded to machines.
I’d rather focus on being mad at Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and all the other billionaires. This is a million miles from being the real problem.
That banana in the photo looks pretty damn fresh to me, how does that work when it’s been some time since the piece was created?
The artist replaces the banana. The art is the concept of the banana on the wall, not the banana itself.
It’s like any art that involves water, like a fountain. You can replace the water and it’s still art.
I’m curious if the artist will continue to replace the banana or if they consider their art to be consumed now.
I think someone else mentioned that the sale included “instructions” on replacing the banana. Which is obviously a joke, but the whole thing is obviously a joke. There’s a real “My grandfather’s axe / ship of Theseus” thing going on there.
Yeah, art is weird like this. It’s not the first time someone has created low-effort garbage and sold it for more than its value. It won’t be the last either. But, it’s fun to observe and react to it.
I think calling this “low effort” maybe misses the point. Don’t think of this as an artwork in the classical painter sense, but rather as a performance. The effect comes from the process as much as from the result.
And yes, it’s easy to say that there was no skill or craft in the performance, but that too is part of the point. Sometimes it not that no one else could do this; it’s simply that no one else did.
In a sense you’re right that this is intentionally low effort. But I think that also dismisses the creativity, insight, and brazen audacity it took to actually pull this off.
Calling it low effort garbage is exactly the point. Art is weird like that. It’s contextual.
Yeah, I guess in that sense we’re saying the same thing.
He’ll try to convince Sun to sell the poop.
It’s Justin Sun. He’ll mint an NFT of the poop, fractionalise it and sell it as a new stablecoin.
Make it into banana bread
I see various people commenting that while this guy paid 6.2M USD on a single banana, a lot of us are struggling to make ends meet. That’s exactly the point. Capitalism makes us miserable to afford behaviors like this everyday. I think the artist of this work ( not the idiot that bought the banana) is showing us very clearly how we’re being explored.
He didn’t buy a banana, well, I mean, he did, but it was the certificates saying this banana is “Comedian” that were worthwhile. The bananas are exchanged when they go rotten anyways. This isn’t a five year old banana.
“The artwork owner is given a certificate of authenticity that it was created by Cattelan, as well as instructions about how to replace the fruit when it turned bad.”
Kinda unbelievable, I assume it’s just to take the tape off and slap it on a new banana
Cattelan is actually a cool guy and this is a troll that has worked for him more than once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurizio_Cattelan#Selected_works
My favorite work of his is definitely the one entitled simply “America.”
He made it in 2016. Can’t imagine what might have prompted it…
crypto and art are mostly used for money laundry
Just another rich nobody who’s desperate to buy people’s attention.
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So desperate for attention
Now, freeze dry and bottle the poop from digesting said banana.
???
???
- Profit
