The case

For a long time,“vita brevis, ars longa” was closely linked to classical ideals because painting, literature and music were regarded as the embodiment of beauty, truth and goodness.

One will have to adapt this ancient principle as modern and postmodern art have increasingly been questioning and expanding this idealistic concept of art. Today’s art is often abstract and at times difficult to understand and, so people say, more arbitrary.

Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine, Watson and SRF 1

The commentary

One example of this development is the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan who created a piece of art showing a banana attached to the wall with adhesive tape. This artefact was sold for a six-digit sum in US dollars and then one fateful day the inevitable happened: a visitor devoured the banana, so it met the same destiny as Kippenberger’s artpiece that was destroyed by a cleaning lady.

This is not the first time that one of Cattelan’s artworks has met this fate. His art also grabbed the headlines when a gold lavatory worth more than € 5 million was stolen from Blenheim Palace near Oxford. Compared to the golden loo, the banana comes in as rather cheap.

The apparent arbitrariness of modern art shows that today the focus is less on the work itself but more on the discourse surrounding art and its definition. Nowadays art is what can assert itself as such, regardless of whether or not the work itself possesses traditional aesthetic or symbolic qualities.

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