I think, as with many people, my sense of humour is specific. Some love physical comedy, some the profane, some the referential intellectual and others …well who knows. My preference has always been towards subtle black comedy but I never did get Monty Python or the Goons in spite of being immersed in them growing up which is probably why I find the Art market of late so ludicrous in that it goes completely over my head. Maybe I need to be Prince Charles, who by all accounts spent untold nights in a locked room on his own, in the dark, laughing hysterically at Spike Milligan and Peter Sellars, or alternatively, whoever paid a small fortune for shredded paper last week as Banksy laughed into his sleeve from behind which bush hid his identity. Clearly there is a need to be somewhat crazy and while I’ve been described as all sorts of things, including crazy, In the end I just sit here dumfounded, my sense of humour having deserted me.

When Danish artist Jens Haaning presented two blank canvases to the Kunsten Museum a week or so ago on the back of a commission, the news went viral. I say news but little of what gets circulated on social media gets beyond gossip and innuendo. The article title though, ‘he took the money and ran’ followed in the great newspaper tradition of the sub-editorial joke although it lacked the usual alliteration. ‘He took the money and motored’, ‘Runaway Art Market Taken for Ride’ or even ‘Double Dutch in Dirty Deal’ might have sufficed. Sub editors always did have licence on the ludicrous but then again, they were in the paper selling business so anything went. The original version of the all-white canvas though dates all the way back to Malevich but he reportedly didn’t have sense of humour and social media didn’t exist. He might have appreciated the joke though when the Kunsyen museum paid out a small fortune for the privilege of being taken for a ride. They are hoping for full compensation. In these days of endless litigation, they could be waiting a while. ‘Kunsten Klanger’, ‘Legal Eagles in Museum Debacle’, the ‘Great Art Heist [you just have to use the American term rather than ‘robbery’, in that it has so much more punch and besides, alliterative ‘ts’ are par for the course].

Social commentary veiled with humour is not new either. Piero Manzoni’s can of Artist’s Shit posing as an art object from 1960 was recently purchased by the Tate Modern and in 2019 the art world went bananas when Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan unveiled Comedian at Art Basel in Miami Beach. ‘Created’ in an edition of three – two were sold for $USD120,000 (each) – was a fresh banana affixed to a wall with duct tape. I don’t know what was more pathetic, the buyers or the public that lapped it up. When half the world’s artists are without an income courtesy of covid lockdowns, it does seem like more of an insult than anything else.

Banksy is always good for a laugh. Stencilling a drawing on a wall raised the status of the wall and associated building to such heights that the owners could retire on the sale of the profits. His notorious Girl With Balloon got global attention of course, immediately after its sale at Sotheby’s for $USD1.4 million, when the artwork self-shredded. The expressions of the faces of the assembled well-heeled was certainly in the realms of black comedy. The self-destructing piece generated a reported 30,000 news stories at the time, which probably denoted a slow news day, but what was more ludicrous was the subsequent buyer of the shreds for an equally large sum. No doubt the purchase will make excellent after dinner conversation at the tables of the rich and/or famous.

I have no doubt all that of the aforementioned artists are as serious in intent as was Duchamp with his recycled rubbish or even the Dadaists providing an axe at the door with which visitors could hack the art to pieces. I guess that you had to live in post WW1 Germany to fully appreciate that brand of humour. Was it always thus? When Courbet painted naked women for chortling and sexually-supressed male clients to hang in the private boudoirs and Manet visited a picnic on the grass on an unsuspecting public, there must have been a knowing nose-in-the-air touch of amusement at the public reaction. I doubt that poor old Monet was laughing when his impression of a sunrise labelled serious artists as fools and jokes but then again everyone from Pollock to de Kooning to Bacon were labelled by a knowing media as a lot more than a joke. They were guilty of subverting art. From all accounts none of them ate bananas, or for that matter, any kind of fruit, unless it was fermented.

Do the art pranksters have a point though? Art is taken so seriously by the auction crowd that even non-art with a label of authenticity gets passed around at a profit. The world is filling up with NFTs masquerading as art and the word of the art dealer/critic is taken as gospel. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Tell the world via social media that someone is famous [you don’t actually need a reason] and lo and behold. I also read this week of a Ghanaian artist who went from selling his paintings for $100 a pop on the streets of Accra to selling for sums in excess of $600,000  on the streets of New York. Lucky him. Let’s hope his sense of humour is in place when he passes his use-by date in a year’s time and Larry Gagosian moves on to his next big discovery. After all, you’re worth a lot more dead than alive. Ask Basquiat, who died at just the right time. Now that is a joke.