“Comedian” and Craft

    In October 2018, a painting by the street muralist Banksy, titled “Girl with a Balloon,” went up for auction at Sotheby’s.  Known for creating graffiti art that is by its very nature uncollectible, Banksy has produced very few prints and even fewer paintings that might be bought and sold.  Not surprisingly, this piece was expected to fetch a high price.  And it did.  The auctioneer’s gavel fell, and a final price of $1,400,000 was set.  And then, an instant later, the piece began to self-destruct.  A paper shredder cleverly hidden within the frame began cutting the piece into ribbons.

    The audience gasped.  The auctioneer’s face went slack.  Some rushed to somehow save the painting.  Yet part way through the destruction the shredder malfunctioned, leaving only the lower half of the piece destroyed.  Despite its “transformation,” the buyer went through with the purchase, which seems to have been a good investment.  Six months later, in March of 2019, the piece was resold for an astounding $25,327,452, more than eighteen times its original value!

    Part of me understands how “Girl with Balloon” resold for so much more than its original sale price.  It was not the same piece of art.  Retitled “Love Is in the Bin,” this new piece had added meaning and significance.  But the original idea that Banksy was going for was entirely lost.  He seems to have been trying to subvert the art market itself, producing a piece that could not be resold and thereby denying the collectors and auction houses their profits.  Instead, the piece's value skyrocketed, and Sotheby’s central place within the meaning and money-making machine that is the art world was only strengthened.  At the sale of “Love Is in the Bin,” the auction house proudly proclaimed that the piece was the first to have been created during an auction.

    I was reminded of “Girl with Balloon” when I recently read about another auction.  In November of 2024, Sotheby's sold a piece by artist Maurizio Cattelan titled “Comedian,” which consists (consisted?) of a banana duct-taped to a wall.  Its final price was $6,200,000, including auction fees.

    The artist explained that the piece was a commentary on the art market and how, once a piece of art is sold, the artist ceases to profit from the value of the work.  “Auction houses and collectors reap the benefits, while the creator, who makes the very object driving the market, is left out.”  By making perishable art Cattelan was subverting this resale market, though “Comedian” did come with instructions and diagrams on how to mount a new banana once the original was gone.  The purchaser, Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, proclaimed that he would eat the banana as part of a “unique artistic experience.”

    At first blush, all this feels pretty alien to the craft world: the de-emphasis of skill, the centrality of collectors and auction houses, and the astronomical prices.  And some might say, “Well, of course it feels alien.  Art and craft are different.”  Years ago I wondered about the art/craft hierarchy, and today looking at “Comedian” I might agree that there seems to be a pretty large gap between the two.  But the more I think about it the more I find the art/craft debate tired, slippery, and unhelpful.

    Some folks trace the origins of the high art/low art debate to Enlightenment thinkers in the late eighteenth century. Enraptured with the idea of reason, they wanted to distinguish between art that was worthy of contemplation and art that was merely accessible to the masses.  Others might go back to Plato and his privileging of the mind over the body, and logic over art.  Whatever its origins, over the past one hundred years this hierarchy has been challenged repeatedly, from the Arts and Crafts Movement up to the present day.  

    For me, the attempt to distinguish art from craft, even in the face of such conceptual art as ‘Comedian,” does not wash.  Can we really assert that one is unique and the other mass-produced, one contemplative and the other accessible, one aesthetic and the other merely useful, etc….  Every cultural producer, from Cattelan to myself, struggles with similar issues: How much should we produce? What meaning does our work hold? What is the relationship between the artist and the consumer? How will our work be used? What is the value of our work?  

    Well-carved spoons are useful sculptures.  Artists struggle with iteration and reproduction as much as craftspeople.  We all weave stories about our work—about the material, the process, the place, ourselves as artists, and the piece’s intended use—which adds significance (and value) to our work.  I think the best craftspeople among us disregard these art/craft distinctions.  Jögge Sundqvist comes to mind.  And even the most conceptual artists like Cattelan produce useful art (get it,…produce.)  

 Just see what is on Justin Sun’s menu.

    

How Plato Screwed the Craftsperson

(Leonardo da Vinci as Plato, detail of The School of Athens by Raphael)

I used to spend my summers as a bike mechanic, once the teaching year had ended.  Lots of folks seemed to think this an odd way for a teacher to spend a summer–why not do something related to my field of expertise, like teaching summer school?  The shops where I worked found it unusual as well.  While working for a Turkish-owned shop, the patriarch took to calling me “hodja” or “teacher.”  I even sensed that some thought the work beneath me–an educator, working with his hands!  Gasp!  But I looked forward to that work, partly as it fed my passion for bikes and bike racing, but also because of the nature of the labor.  After spending the school year working primarily with my brain, I found it cathartic to work with my hands.  Or, maybe more accurately, it was a relief to allow my brain to be “embodied,” to problem-solve through my body with my mind.  As my life changed and my interests shifted from bikes to craft, I found that carving or turning on the weekends and over vacations served a very similar role–repairing the mind/body split that modern academia expects.

But why is this unnatural mind/body hierarchy so central to schooling and Western society in general?  I would blame it on Plato (and Descartes.)  Plato argued the imperfect, changing, decaying world around us is just a copy of a perfect, timeless, and rational higher sphere, and that we should spend our time contemplating those higher forms and not their fleeting manifestations in everyday life.  This philosophy elevated the mind over the body and reason over applied skills.  It may be an oversimplification, but I can’t help but think that this is why we are left with an academia today that celebrates the “life of the mind” and casts a side-eye at trade education, why we seem to think that students learn best when seated in orderly rows, why poster projects are viewed as “easy assignments,” and why any student who does not fit such a system must be “hyperactive” or have “attention deficit.”  We have built an education system that not only poorly serves the many intelligences in our classrooms, but also fundamentally misunderstands how we learn.  We teach our children as if their minds were disembodied, instead of grasping a relatively simple truth: we learn with our hands.  

John Dewey got this.  He and other pragmatists rejected the mind/body dualism of Plato and Descartes (the “I-think-therefore-I-am” guy), and instead argued that there was a “continuity” between the body and the mind, that all of our “rational operations grow out of organic activities.” The “progressive education” that grew out of Dewy’s work recognized that rationality emerges from the body’s interaction with the environment.  Sadly, this movement did not fundamentally shift the trajectory of the American classroom, and we still teach students as if they are brains with no bodies.  

After stepping away from the high school classroom a few years ago and taking up craft and craft education full time, I find myself reflecting a lot on the Platonic and Cartesian mind/body split and how to heal that wound.  Plato had a decidedly dim view of arts and crafts.  He proposed that artists be banished from the Republic, as their messages might undermine the social hierarchy, and he placed artisans within the lowest class in his ideal society.  No wonder, as he so devalued the body and what it might teach us.  Craft education very well may be part of how we help heal this mind/body dualism.  

So, as I prepare for more craft classes, I am taking time to read about slöjd education in Scandinavian countries, and enjoying the journey.  I am also making my way through Sarah Kuhn’s Transforming Learning Through Tangible Instruction, which inspired some of this blog post.  And she asked a question that I want to leave you with: “Where do you do your best thinking?” 

I bet it is not at your desk…