Sotheby’s auction off the famous banana duct-taped to a wall. Picture: AP
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sitting on a park bench. Guildenstern is polishing an apple. Rosencrantz has bananas on his mind.
Rosencrantz: Do you know Guildenstern, I hadn’t quite realised this to now, but there’s a real art to how you polish an apple.
Guildenstern: Why thank you. I hadn’t even thought about it. It’s just natural to me.
Rosencrantz: It’s as if you have a method to it.
Guildenstern: A method in my madness you think?
Rosencrantz: Ha. Perhaps. No, it’s like each time you do it it’s both natural and as if it’s the first time, like you hold it up to the light, perceive your course, and begin the polishing. It’s an artform.
Guildenstern: Lucky, it’s not a banana then. Mind you, there is no point to polishing a banana since its peel is unappealing, so to speak, for polishing.
Rosencrantz: But everything for the process of consumption.
Guildenstern: Yes.
Rosencrantz: If I were an art impresario, I would stop you right here, demand the apple, mount it on a plate, give it a title, and declare to the world, behold the art of Guildenstern!
Guildenstern: Yes, but why?
Rosencrantz: Art, like beauty, they say is in the eye of the beholder. What if I told you someone taped a banana to a wall, gave it a name, that it had travelled the world, been exhibited in galleries and attended by thousands, and that it recently sold at auction for close to $10 million?
Guildenstern: I’d say, you were mad, the buyer was mad or the world had gone mad.
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Rosencrantz: It’s true, though not necessarily me, and does lend weight to the latter.
Guildenstern: A banana taped to wall sold for $10 million?
Rosencrantz: Yes.
Guildenstern: But it’s just a banana on a wall.
Rosencrantz: Yes, or maybe not. Perhaps it’s an endless enigma, perhaps it is symbolic of whatever the viewer of it imagines it to be. Hence, my attraction to your apple. The possibilities are limitless. What colour apple? What colour plate? Indeed, would we glue it to the wall, at perhaps right angles, leave it flat on a table?
Guildenstern: It just seems farfetched, my friend.
Rosencrantz: I would have said so once, but this being the art world where a shark in formaldehyde or an unmade bed can be deemed artistic expression, anything is possible, which actually is how art should be deemed.
Guildenstern: But what if I want to eat the apple? After all, it is my apple, and I am hungry.
Rosencrantz: Sometimes, life has a higher calling Guildenstern, especially in art – the sacrifices that to be made for one’s creation, the food for one’s soul.
Guildenstern: Never mind that, my friend. (He takes a bite out of the apple). Now what do you say?
Rosencrantz: I say the enigma of art has taken a different shape. Now it is the fallen apple. I must go to find a plate. I think a white plate, or perhaps one with a slight crack in it, symbolising humankind’s path.
Guildenstern: Can you buy me a banana, too? I feel the muse rising, or is that my stomach grumbling?
Rosencrantz: (Rises). We’ll need some duct tape, too. And an agent….
