In a very exclusive room far far away, a very ordinary looking wooden gavel comes down on an equally ordinary looking rostrum and somehow millions of dollars have transpired within that quarter of a second.At the centre of the stage, the reason a transaction of $6.24 million dollars (Rs 59.42 crore) just transpired, is a banana and a small piece of duct tape.This is not a fictional tale, though its absurdity may present it as one. Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual artwork, Comedian, was a banana taped with duct tape. Before the auction for the piece started a member of staff went out to get a banana from a local fruit vendor, because the Comedian was never about art. Its value lies in the theatrics. The fruit rotted within days, as fruit does. It has since been eaten — twice, by strangers, before the auction even happened, and a third time by its new owner, live on camera, minutes after paying millions for it. What actually changed hands was a certificate of authenticity and a laminated instruction sheet on how to tape up the next banana.It would be convenient to see modern and contemporary art as something that has fallen off the high horse that classical art seems to be saddled onto. Anyone can do it, so what makes it special? Why do people pay millions for art which looks like a toddler’s creation?
Exhibit A: The man who threw paint
Jackson Pollock is an artist who barely picked up a paintbrush and still became a millionaire. He laid his canvases flat on the floor of a barn and dripped, flung, and poured industrial enamel paint from a can, walking around and sometimes into the work as he made it.For the longest time, to an ‘uneducated’ eye, and sometimes even an ‘educated’ one, his art seemed to be just uncontrolled splashes framed on a wall. But this assumption was complicated in 1999 by a physicist.
Number 17A, 1948 by Jackson Pollock (Source: jackson-pollock.org)
In 1999, a team led by physicist Richard Taylor analysed Pollock’s poured canvases and found they were fractal – patterns that repeat at increasingly fine magnifications, the same geometry found in lightning, and the branching of trees – and that the complexity of these fractals increased systematically over the decade Pollock spent refining the technique. The finding was celebrated widely: here, finally, was science proving what the market had been pricing in all along, there was now scientific value to the price tag.But theories rarely stand the test of time and peers. Between 2006 and 2007, a separate team of physicists at Case Western Reserve University, Katherine Jones-Smith, Harsh Mathur, and Lawrence Krauss, tested the same fractal criteria against a wider set of images, and the results were uncomfortable for anyone hoping fractals could settle the argument for good.Two undisputed, museum-authenticated Pollock paintings failed the fractal test. Meanwhile, drip paintings commissioned from two amateur artists who had simply studied Pollock’s technique passed it comfortably. Crude freehand doodles of stars and pebbles, sketched in a matter of minutes by one of the physicists, satisfied the very same “authentication criteria” being used to distinguish a genuine Pollock from a forgery.In other words: the fractal signature supposedly unteachable and unique to Pollock could be reproduced by an amateur with no training, and was, on occasion, missing from Pollock’s own work.This does not make Pollock a fraud, his value comes from his technical rupture from the history of painting. The market’s valuation of Pollock was never actually contingent on that proof. His Number 17A sold privately for $200 million in 2015, a price set almost entirely by scarcity, provenance, and decades of institutional canon-building, with or without a physicist in the room to vouch for the fractals.
Exhibit B: The man who could not be moved
Pollock, at least, was accused of moving too much. Mark Rothko’s problem was the opposite, critics accused him of doing almost nothing at all. Stand in front of a late Rothko and what you get is two or three softly bordered rectangles of colour, stacked on a canvas the size of a wall. One of the easiest pieces to forge inside an elementary school arts class, you’d just have to minimise the canvas.
Untitled, Mark Rothko (Source: MoMA)
Rothko himself seemed to have contempt for the people who’d eventually pay the most for his work. In 1958, he accepted his first major commission, a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building, and told a magazine publisher exactly why: “I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a b*tch who ever eats in that room.” He worked on the murals for two years, then refused to deliver them, returned the fee, and gave the paintings to a museum instead. He didn’t want his work hanging as wallpaper for rich diners.Six decades later, rich collectors are still buying his work, just at auction instead of in a dining room, and for considerably more than a restaurant fee. Seven Rothko paintings have now sold for over $50 million each. One holds an $86.9 million record.And in at least one case, nobody involved could actually tell whether what they were buying was a Rothko at all.In 2004, Domenico De Sole, chairman of Sotheby’s, one of the two auction houses that sets these very prices, paid $8.3 million for a Rothko he believed genuine. It wasn’t.It had been painted by Pei-Shen Qian, an artist working out of a garage in Queens, for less than $9,000. The only reason it was caught was because the pigments in the paint hadn’t been invented yet when Rothko was supposedly alive to use them. Until then, it had fooled everyone: Knoedler, one of New York’s oldest and most respected galleries; outside scholars; and even Rothko’s own son, who admitted he could not rule out that it was real.During the trial, one Abstract Expressionist scholar made an admission that might be the single most useful sentence in this whole article: he had, at one point, said that all Rothkos look alike.But to Rothko his art was supposed to hold value only for him and those who understood him. “I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else,” he said. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom.” He wanted his canvases hung low, and viewers standing close enough to feel swallowed by the colour rather than looking at it from a comfortable distance.Independent of any auction house, there’s some evidence he was right. Art historian James Elkins, researching people who cry in front of paintings, concluded that more people have likely wept in front of Rothko’s work than any other painter of the twentieth century. So the case against Rothko was never really “there’s nothing there.” It’s closer to: whatever is there, it isn’t legible to everyone, and, as it turned out, it wasn’t even fully legible to the experts who spend their careers looking at it.
Exhibit C: The man who could not be understood
Cy Twombly’s most famous paintings look, at a glance, like a chalkboard nobody erased. Loops, scratches, half-formed letters.In 1994, when the Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective, the curator felt the need to write an essay specifically defending him from the obvious accusation. He titled it “Your Kid Could Not Do This.”
Untitled (New York City), 1968, Cy Twombly (Source: Museum Brandhorst)
Twombly heard the comparison often enough to answer it directly: “My line is childlike but not childish,” he said. “It is very difficult to fake.”In 2007, at an exhibition in France, a woman named Rindy Sam walked up to one of Twombly’s all-white canvases and kissed it, leaving a smear of red lipstick. She was arrested and tried in court for “voluntary degradation of a work of art.” Her defence: “I just gave it a kiss. It’s a gesture of love.” Her reasoning did not move the court, and she was fined and ordered to pay restoration costs. Somewhere in that courtroom, a judge had to formally decide that one set of marks on a canvas was priceless art, and another mark, smaller, arguably more deliberate, was criminal damage.That’s the real trick behind a Twombly, and arguably behind most of the art in this piece: it isn’t that the marks are meaningless. It’s that meaning here isn’t available on sight. Twombly filled his canvases with references to Keats, Rilke, and classical myth.One series of drawings is nothing but the word “Virgil,” written over and over. If you don’t know who Virgil is, the work reads as a scribble. If you do, it reads as an argument about memory, war, and how little of the ancient world survives translation. The painting is still the same but now the viewer knows how to read it.None of that erudition, of course, is what set Untitled (New York City), wax crayon and house paint on canvas, to $70.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2015. It was sold for that value because there are only approximately 650 Twomblys that will ever exist, because a rival auction house had just set a comparable record a year earlier and everyone in that room knew it, because two of art history’s most trusted names (Castelli, Saatchi) had once owned it, and because bidding against each other in that room was itself the social event, the applause afterward wasn’t for the painting, it was for the sale.
Exhibit D: The man who sold nothing
Cy Twombly at least left something on the canvas. Yves Klein, by the end of his life, had stopped leaving anything at all.His early fame came from a singular colour. A saturated, powdery ultramarine he mixed himself, applied without a brush because he considered brushwork “too psychological,” and patented in 1960 as International Klein Blue. It’s the most literal branding exercise, a specific shade of blue, legally his, sold on canvases that were otherwise identical, differing only in size.
Blue Monochrome, 1961, Yves Klein
But you would be wrong to think that the blue was the climax of his genius. In 1958, Klein emptied a Paris gallery completely, painted the walls white, and posted French Republican Guards outside the door. He called the show Le Vide, The Void, and between two to three thousand people paid to see nothing.He took it a step further and found a way to sell nothing. Between 1959 and his death in 1962, Klein sold eight “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” – parcels of empty, non-existent space – in exchange for pure gold. Buyers were given a receipt and If they wanted the zone to be permanently, irreversibly theirs, they had to burn it, in a ritual on the banks of the Seine, while Klein threw half their gold into the river in front of them.
Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (Source: yvesklein.org)
In 2022, one of the surviving unburned receipts, for a zone bought in 1959 for 20 grams of gold, sold at Sotheby’s for €1,063,500. Sotheby’s own marketing compared the lot to an NFT.Klein sold nothing, because he wanted to sell nothing. And his work still appreciates in value, because the market wants to appreciate it.
Exhibit E: The emperor who wears receipts
There’s an economic term for what’s actually happening across all four artists and their sales, and it predates every artist in this piece by half a century.In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen coined “conspicuous consumption”, spending that serves no purpose beyond announcing wealth, prestige bought and displayed as its own reward. Economists later named the specific class of goods this produces: a Veblen good is one whose demand rises as its price rises, because the price isn’t a barrier to the purchase. That’s the point of it.That reframes everything in this piece. “This makes no visual sense” was never the market’s problem to solve. It might be the feature being sold.Nobody buys a banana taped to a wall because it’s a well-made banana. Nobody buys a Rothko because they’ve personally verified, against forensic-grade scrutiny, that the brushwork is genuine, the people best positioned to tell you that couldn’t either, and one of them admitted under oath that all Rothkos look alike to him.What’s actually being bought, sale after sale, is scarcity nobody can manufacture, a provenance trail that vouches for itself, and a seat in the room where the gavel falls. The object is almost incidental. It could be a scribble, a rectangle of colour, a piece of fruit, or literally nothing at all.That’s also why an artist’s death is never just sad news for the market. It’s an inventory event. The day a major artist dies, their catalogue closes forever, and everyone with a stake in that market knows it before the obituary is even scripted.The gavel is ordinary, the rostrum is ordinary; the people in the room aren’t. What happens in that quarter-second was never really a verdict on the banana, the scribble, or the empty room. It’s a group of people with more money than they know what to do with, agreeing out loud, in front of each other, on exactly how much status is worth buying this week. The emperor knows he has no clothes, but wearing receipts seems good enough.
