Art world – fruit consumption | nd-aktuell.de

If different types of fruit were to compete over their cultural and historical influence, the apple would probably emerge as the winner. After all, it already plays a decisive role in the original motif of Christianity, the fall of man. Just like Eve, Snow White cannot resist his toxic seduction. Plump and shiny, it stands for vitality – which is probably why it is a popular first name in the Anglosphere. The work of the US pop musician Fiona Apple is recommended at this point.

Of course, other types of fruit also have an established place in cultural history. The strawberry, for example, red and sweet, seems to have inspired artists to imagine complete happiness. For example, in their song “Strawberry Fields” (1967), which was written during the height of the hippie movement, the Beatles dream of a fantastic place where you don’t have to worry about anything. The fruit in Ingmar Bergman’s drama “Wild Strawberries” (1957) represents something similar. The original Swedish title exactly translates to “wild strawberry patch” and figuratively means a hidden place of great personal significance.

While apples and strawberries appear in oil paintings from different eras, the banana only found its way into Western cultural history relatively recently – because for a long time it was not known to most people. That changed with recent colonial history. From 1891 to 1893, Paul Gauguin lived in French Polynesia and painted the bananas growing there. A little later, Giorgio de Chirico placed them in a surreal setting. The banana then had resounding success in pop culture with the banana cover designed by Andy Warhol of the record “The Velvet Underground and Nico” (1967), the debut of the legendary New York art rock band. Presumably the banana here, like everything with Warhol, has something to do with late capitalist consumer culture. This undoubtedly also applies to the banana installation “Comedian” (2019) by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which was auctioned on Wednesday. It – or the underlying concept of a banana stuck to the wall – went to the Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun in New York for 6.2 million US dollars. Will the auction increase the cultural significance of the banana? In any case, she is pretty “bananas” (crazy).

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