For before condemning contemporary art as a whole, we should first bear in mind one obvious fact: there is no single form of contemporary art, but rather thousands of different artists, practices and approaches. Lumping together a painter who spends six months working alone on a canvas, a visual artist creating a monumental installation and Maurizio Cattelan sticking a banana to a wall is like reducing the entire world of cinema to a single film.
And then there’s that famous urinal.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp presented *Fountain*, an industrial urinal turned upside down and signed ‘R. Mutt’. So we aren’t even in the realm of ‘contemporary art’ in the usual chronological sense yet. Above all, Duchamp planted an intellectual bombshell: is it the making of the object that constitutes the artwork, or the artist’s choice and the context in which the object is presented?
More than a century later, we are still debating it. For a supposedly empty joke, it has proved remarkably enduring.
The same phenomenon applies to *Comedian*, Maurizio Cattelan’s famous banana stuck to the wall with adhesive tape. The work was sold at Sotheby’s in November 2024 for $6.24 million, including fees. This spectacular sum obviously fuels the notion of a market that has gone mad. But the buyer was not simply acquiring ‘a six-million-dollar banana’: the work is underpinned, in particular, by a certificate of authenticity and instructions for its reinstallation. The banana itself is replaceable.
This is precisely where the misunderstanding arises.
Ever since Duchamp, a strand of art has no longer sought primarily to produce a beautiful object. It seeks to produce an idea, a disruption or a question. One might find this development fascinating, pretentious, amusing, irritating or completely fruitless. But reducing the phenomenon to a scam prevents us from understanding what has actually happened in the history of art.
On the other hand, defending the existence of contemporary art does not in any way mean defending its market.
This market can reach dizzying levels of speculation. Artistic value, fame, rarity, a gallery’s prestige, a work’s provenance and the financial clout of collectors all intertwine. A multi-million auction result therefore does not constitute mathematical proof that one work is ‘better’ than another. The price measures what someone is willing to pay in a given market; it does not provide a scientific measure of beauty or genius.
This is probably where popular criticism hits upon something true. When institutional discourse becomes deliberately opaque, when three paragraphs of jargon are needed to explain a trivial object, when an artist’s standing seems to depend more on their network than on their work, such scepticism is by no means absurd.
And contemporary art itself loves to play on this mistrust.
Banksy provided a spectacular illustration of this in 2018: mere seconds after *Girl with Balloon* was sold at Sotheby’s, the work partially self-destructed thanks to a mechanism hidden within its frame. The gesture seemed to mock the art market. In a perfect twist of irony, the work – renamed *Love is in the Bin* – was subsequently resold in 2021 for 18.6 million pounds.
The market is capable of turning its own criticism into a luxury commodity.
This is perhaps a more interesting question than ‘is contemporary art a scam?’.
Who decides today what is worth anything?
The artist? The museum? The gallery owner? The curator? The billionaire collector? The auction house? The media? The public? Probably all of them, to varying degrees. And this mechanism of legitimisation is well worth scrutinising.
But there remains a problem for proponents of the ‘great swindle’: for several generations now, conceptual, minimalist and performance art – and the countless movements that have followed in their wake – have been producing works, artists, museums, controversies and, above all, new ways of looking at the world.
A scam can last a long time. But when it permanently transforms our very definition of art, perhaps we need to find another word.
You might hate a banana stuck to the wall. You might think a monochrome is a joke. You might walk out of an exhibition thinking: ‘My six-year-old son could do the same’.
That’s perfectly acceptable.
But we must then accept this slight quirk of contemporary art: at the very moment we start to wonder whether what we’re looking at is really art, the work may already have succeeded in part of its purpose.
