Who is the butt of the joke here? Sotheby’s just sold a banana stuck to the wall with duct tape entitled “Comedian”. Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun bought the artwork by Maurizio Cattelan for $6.2mn including fees. Sun said he would eat the banana. If you have conventional tastes in art, the joke is on Sun for wasting his money. But that would also mean the joke is on you, from Sun and Cattelan’s likely viewpoint. Enraging the hidebound bourgeoisie is a traditional pursuit of artists.
This fosters the idea that art can be viewed as an asset similar to equities. That is also an error. But it does not stop some dealers from promoting “art as an investment”. Some quote auction price increases and indices derived from them as if they were investment returns. One brochure claims contemporary art has outperformed the FTSE 100 by 400 per cent over a few years. A commonly occurring “return” figure for contemporary art is 7.5 per cent annually.