It hadn’t occurred to me until I read an article about the slow demise of the baby boomer generation and a shift in the profile of art collectors, that I am part of that generation and all that it accomplished, not just artistically but as the motivating force behind the art market. We shaped the thinking not only about the form art could take but notions about what to invest in. As the transfer of wealth from baby boomers to their millennial offspring occurs so do tastes on what is worth investing in. Apparently, Gen Z and Millennials are much more interested in luxury items such as jewellery, watches, handbags and immersive cultural events involving a wine cellar, music and restaurants where the like-minded can gather. A friend of mine spoke of her millennial daughter and the number of $1200 handbags she owns as a case in point.

Does this mean that the solitary art collector amassing works to be stored in a vault as items of value and appreciation may well be a thing of the past? Even the idea of money as we have known it is shifting as crypto-currency and digital tools supersede traditional currency exchange and the whole NFT concept looms over collecting. The whole point about the expensive handbag is that it is meant to be seen and bestow success and identity while the NFT guarantees a one off.  I guess that owning the Cattelan banana concept accomplishes the same thing.

In fact, if we can talk about facts at all, the quoted tipping point of this shift is Justin Sun’s $6.2 million purchase of Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana using cryptocurrency. The banana on the wall is a reminder that not only art can be anything but it does not need to be complex or expensive to be meaningful. The banana on the wall is classified as a commentary on the commodification of art. While art has always been seen as a luxury item, something that is only accessible to the wealthy, bananas are cheap and plentiful. Anyone can go to a grocery store and buy a banana, and anyone can tape it to a wall. As Andy Warhol famously said, “Art is whatever you can get away with”.

Catellan’s banana ‘Comedian’ and his gold toilet entitled ‘America’ continue the assault begun at the beginning of the 20^th century there were three driving forces – Picasso and Cubist construction, Matisse and colour, and Duchamp with the readymade – three very different ways of not just looking at art but the kind of art produced. One hundred years later the remnants of Picasso and Matisse dot the landscape while the banana as a found object points the way to a kind of art where the artist has to do little and the art-going public can momentarily comment on the very nature of art before patience and ennui set in. The attention span of the current generation of art lovers is short and a banana taped to a wall requires little mental intelligence. The question though is whether this is a rejuvenation of the arguments surrounding the work of Duchamp [the original of his “fountain” has been replaced at least once] or that a century later with the impending demise of the baby boomers, readymade art had found its audience.

Would a baby boomer invest in the banana or is it the province of millennials with too much money on their hands?  The baby boomers sought to sanctify the experiments in art from Duchamp onwards by attaching value to them not so much as artefacts of cultural value, although I suspect that some had a genuine affection for the art that defined them as a generation, but as an investment in a global financial system. Whether those works will hold their value is a moot point when a new generation doesn’t much value them at all. For Justin Sun it would appear that it isn’t about the money at all – or about a banana. Owning an idea is more to the point.

So, what can we expect from now on? More bananas? The 80s generation who financed huge works out in the desert [Michael Heizer’s “City” took a lifetime to build, cost $50 million and can only be seen by a handful of people at any one time minus cameras] followed the boomers who created ephemeral ‘happenings’ in the 60s which were seldom recorded. Each represented an idea/experience but unlike the banana existed more in the mind/experience than as an object. But then again, the oft quoted assessment of colour field and abstract expressionist painting that a five-year old could have done it, is more appropriate to the banana. The decline in education and rise in populist politics suggest that western civilisation at least is in its death throes. Perhaps the generations that followed the path the boomers created has led to this point and we are about to enter a second version of the middle-ages where only the ultra-rich dot com empresarios can afford bananas and the rest of humanity descend into a cultural vacuum. It took a few hundred years to climb out of the dark ages and even then superstition and ignorance prevailed for at least three hundred more. Given three hundred years from now the baby boomers, millennials and Gen Z will be long gone and the ultra-rich will be camped on Mars thumbing their noses at the have-nots. ‘Comedian’ may well be an apt description.