Secret Shorts and Pumpanomics
Demonize, Defame, Denigrate
It seems like every week the memory hole grows ever deeper. Last week alone Bitcoin hit $100,000 for the first time, South Korea declared martial law, and the Talk Tuah Girl launched a scam crypto coin. And then the United Healthcare CEO got blasted away by a masked assassin in a Tommy Hilfiger jacket in full view of surveillance cameras that somehow lost track of him after he pulled off a hit so professional I can only speculate that it was ordered by some DOJ egghead. Conspiracy theory you say? Well, as the joke goes - what is the difference between truth and a conspiracy theory? About six months. Apparently this guy managed to engrave the words ‘deny’,’defend’,’depose’ on the three bullet casings that sent the UH executive into the world of shadows, knew exactly where the CEO was going to be and that he’d have no security detail, evidently he must’ve had special military training due to the fact he was cooler than a cucumber as he pumped the CEO full of lead and finally he continues to evade arrest in one of the most surveilled cities in the world. But another thing happened. Almost immediately products with the three D’s started to roll off the shelves and the assassin became an instant folk hero.
Did you even notice or remember that the week prior crypto billionaire Justin Sun ate a $6.2 million banana?
When the banana news was still news, the big meme was about the fruit vendor who sold the banana, that was later bought by Sun at a Sotheby’s auction, for 25 cents. Maurizio Cattelan, the artist who ‘made’ the Duct Tape Banana, did not get compensated for the sale either, though it sounds like he was cool with it. Mutatis mutandis, a 25 cent banana that sold for $6.2 million was eaten like a 25 cent banana. This is what it feels like to live in the interminable late stage of capitalism. But let’s backtrack a little.
During the 2000s everyone’s favorite art villain and punching bag was Damien Hirst. Known for wooing gullible art collectors with ‘conceptual’ art pieces like split sheep, pigs and cows dipped in formaldehyde and wrapped in sophomoric babble about the nature of death, Hirst really made his name with a tiger shark suspended in a tank of the substance favored by morticians and giving it a salaciously self-aggrandizing title. ‘The Physical Impossibility of Dying in the Mind of Someone Living’ was once unironically referred to as the modern Mona Lisa. Hirst later became even more (in)famous for buying his own artwork using a fake consortium, just to inflate its value (or more likely to prevent it from collapsing). Around that time, when asked what he considered his medium to be, Hirst quipped, “money,” anticipating the art world’s ongoing love affair with finance, especially the most nihilistic variety. Today we are living with the natural outgrowth (symptom?) of that era.
By the time the Duct Tape Banana spectacle rolled around in 2019, I was already too jaded and cynical about the art world to comment on it. It wasn’t smart, it wasn’t clever, it was mostly annoying, like Jeff Koons’ personality or the Just Stop Oil activists throwing tomato sauce on plexiglass in front of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers.’ Cattelan’s art was supposedly critical about the art world’s attachment to money and shock value. Instead his commentary only propped up the myth and the paper value of his ‘art’. The grand sum of these acts is that it has thrown light on how much more vapid and meaningless elite art culture has become since the days of Hirst. It’s a culture filled with empty gestures and stilted political signaling whose real mission is the ritual exorcism and absolution of guilt the wealthy have over cultural appropriation and exploitation they helped to usher into existence. If you have any doubts about this phenomenon please go watch ‘Selling Sunset.’
Enter Justin Sun of Tron infamy. Sun is part of the new generation of crypto finance billionaire ‘bros’ who are completely free from old-world bourgeois attitudes. They’re young and brash and do not give a fvck about the environment, community, the public or the art world’s feigned elite concerns. The only thing they care about is making money and selling out as soon and as quickly as possible. To them money symbolizes pure energy, a resource to be violently extracted in the pursuit of more profit. So it makes sense that the art world evangelists jostle to get them through the doors of their boutique art spaces and into their offshore bank accounts. These nouveau riche are meant to patch the gap left by the old money generation of art philanthropists who are slowly but surely riding off into the sunset. Someone has to continue to write those big checks that are the lifeline of every museum under the sun (no pun intended). But it feels like the evangelists are barking up the wrong tree. Someone like Justin Sun cares about the Mona Lisa the way that Vince McMahon cares about women’s rights.
The original Duct Tape Banana was a financial transaction mistaken for a conceptual artwork. Rather than comparing it to Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ or whatever, which would be a disservice to Duchamp’s intellect, a better comparison for the Banana is the NFT or a memecoin. The Banana exists for the same reason that the meme coin and NFT exist, to go up in value. They exhibit the same sort of ‘pumpamentals’, which is a crypto bro term for favorable narratives that are used to ‘pump’ the price of an asset. Not even Justin Sun’s eating of the Banana can tank the price right now, because it exists in the same world of make-believe value creation (the only thing they care about). What will eventually tank the value is going to be the same lack of attention that made Damien Hirst’s works undesirable after there was no more fuel in the tank of the narrative machine and he became a non-person.
There’s too much cynicism in the world and I get it. We’re all atomized individual subjects. But I no longer believe that we live in siloes. Nobody, not even Justin Sun is that unique. We’re part of the same cultural soup and subject to the same forces that culture exerts on us, and that is why the elites are trying so damn hard to escape them or, failing that, create the conditions in which they can continue to live at the expense of those below and that is why the United Healthcare CEO assassination struck such a chord with the public.
See you in the next one!
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MERCH