THE INVISIBLE BANANA

Copyright Fred Forest (images and texts)

What is the invisible banana of Fred Forest? It is a critical "work-information" that questions the market of the contemporary art. It leans and builds itself in slight shift on the sale of the Banana of Maurizio Cattelan realized by the Perrotin Gallery for an amount of 120.000 $ usd for the Fair of Miami 2019. It is a question for Fred Forest to take the collectors to the game of their own conditioning and to highlight the gregarious behaviors of which they are victims, under influence and dependence to their own environment. An eco-system that functions in complete autonomy for a circle of initiates. An environment that has maintained for about fifty years the myth of a radically new art, free of all formal constraints. A way very often to produce anything nonsense as Jean Baudrillard pointed out in a column in Libération on May 13, 2002. In order to make their acquisitions, these wealthy amateurs blindly follow the prescriptions (without even discussing them) made to them by the operators of an art market, which decides in a quasi-arbitrary way, once and for all and in their place, on the market value of the works. Values whose only references are based on a quotation system established on the basis of previous sales and art estimates of a purely subjective nature, which take the place of true beliefs.  A system in which the supposed "artistic" value of the works is never, or hardly ever, taken into account. It is also a data that does not fit into the Aesthetics parameter, which can never be evaluated and quantifiable, and therefore measured, as everyone knows. Faced with this de facto impossibility, it is the expert's discretionary opinion that is authoritative and which, with a ladle, determines its supposed market value? And as experts are rarely of the same opinion, except when they belong to the same company, the quidam remains stuck on the spot in vain waiting for an answer from the sky. Of course, other criteria of evaluation will be put forward to me, such as the importance of the work in relation to the personal trajectory of the artist, or even according to the privileged situation of the work in the history of an artistic movement, or even the history of art in general, but this does not imply, for me, the commercial value attributed to it, given the lack of equivalence between an impalpable and eminently abstract system, that of taste and desire, and that of finance, which is counted in ringing and stumbling currencies. ..

To demonstrate this, the artist has developed a quasi-machiavelic mechanism. To paraphrase the painter Maurice Denis, he states here as he did: "To remember that a work, before being a battle horse, a naked woman or any kind of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours in a certain assembled order. "The work that Forest proposes to us answers to a process whose intention is similar: to create a device that has for essential purpose, not to show us at a first level of interpretation what we see, but rather to reveal the reality that is underlying him... 

Forest implemented the protocol that follows to try to make of it in five points an unstoppable demonstrative and pedagogical process. Anticipating on the behaviors to come of the targeted collectors, he already knew in advance what would be the outcome. Of the 400 French collectors solicited to buy the Invisible Banana at the price of the Perrotin Banana for $120,000, he knew beforehand that not a single one of them would buy it! This prediction was in no way based on the use of a crystal ball, but only on an excellent knowledge of the psychology of a segment of the population, whose behaviour he had been able to observe without prejudice for more than fifty years. Since the contemporary art market system is unable, and for good reason, to put in place credible evaluation tools to determine the average price of works, the system only maintains itself and persists in the self-referential opacity of the market that is its own. Adjusting at most and somewhat upwards or downwards, according to the market's offers. Indeed, the taste of individuals for art is an immaterial, non-quantifiable data, and cannot be translated by a system of measurement.  Stimulating, themselves, the demand in price ranges that are agreed upon by people of good company. Price ranges that are more or less validated by the interplay of supply and demand, with the exception of a few failures, or unexpected successes...The prices set can in no way reflect an objective reality, so that the determining criteria are not always the same.

The prices set can in no way reflect an objective reality, so that the determining criteria on a common evaluation value grid can never be established. Otherwise from one sale to the next, through corrective and provisional consensus. It is obvious that, due to the lack of objective evaluation criteria, it is impossible to determine veritably he intrinsic market value of a work, not only in relation to works by the same artist, but but more so in relation to those of other artists to whom it could be compared.

This, of course, makes any awarding of a prize to a work of art problematic.

Taking thus support on the work of Cattelan, as a model-repoussoir, and not as an ideal model, Forest borrows shamelessly his generic name of banana and his selling price from him. Two criteria which cannot fall under the blow of the plagiat and launches, its process in the form of a protocol in six points:

THE INVIDIBLE

1- He creates a traditional work of art, deliberately ironically composed of a white porcelain plate from Limoges, glued on a space media support framed on its periphery with black joints... As could have been any still life in a bourgeois living room above the piano.  This plate, being supposed to have contained a banana, which today has completely disappeared, without leaving any trace... Hence its title "Invisible Banana". This banana can, like Cattelan's, be replaced as many times as necessary by the owner of the work, all the more easily as it is mental!

2- He sends a personal correspondence to the 400 most important French collectors, making them an offer to buy this work, at the price of the banana sold by Perrotin at the Miami Art Fair 2020, i.e. 120.000 $ usd or 108.120 €. 

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3- This particular sale requires the services of a Bailiff, Mr. Eric La Marec, legal guarantor of the legality of the transaction. The latter is in charge of handing over any cheque received in settlement of the sale to the Association of Artists, Mains d'?uvres, in difficulty, expelled from its premises by the Mayor of the town of Saint Ouen and recently reinstated by the Judge of the Court of Bobigny, but only for one year. This association is in fact the only beneficiary of this sale, the artist and the gallery owner, Stéphane Mortier, donating generously to it, thus positioning themselves as people with a philanthropic vocation.

4- On the date of June 2, 2020, the Bailiff will be in position, either to hand over the check of the sale to the Association Mains d'oeuvres, or to establish a negative statement of sale, intended for the artist Fred Forest who sponsored it.

5- For the moment, two months after the launching of the operation, no request for purchase has been made to the Bailiff. This already accredits the idea that none of the 400 soliciting collectors will be even more buyer on June 2, 2020.  The idea is therefore imposed that the purchases are in a way remotely controlled in a very discriminatory way by market operators, who implicitly and arbitrarily impose prices on artists that they have selected in advance themselves, and of which they artificially set the price.

THE QUESTION THIS RESULT OF THE EXPERIENCE BY FOREST IS TO KNOW WHY, between two works that can be considered EQUIVALENT IN ARTISTIC AND COMMERCIAL VALUE AT THE ORIGIN, DOES SUCH A DISTORTION EXIST IN THE END? SUCH DISCRIMINATION ON THE PART OF FRENCH COLLECTORS? ESPECIALLY WHEN ONE KNOWS THAT THE PURPOSE OF THE OPERATION WAS PHILANTHROPIC IN NATURE...

        Indeed, the only advantage of notoriety that Cattelan presents on Forest in their respective biographies it is only to have seen its coast climbing considerably in an artificial way by the speculative manipulations of the operators of the market, speculations in which the greatest collectors participate, as accomplices at the same time implicit and objective.  Operators-collectors who manipulate aesthetic values to transform them to their advantage into financial liquidity through successive operations, imposing their models on society through the outrageous marketing they practice, the press organs they hold that relay them, and the interpersonal relationships they maintain in the political circles and cultural administrations that are obliged to them.  So much so that we have seen them, for some of them, use former ministers of culture for their service, as if they were innocent and vulgar employees... Without, of course, shocking anyone!

With the whole state apparatus in their hands, these people have no idea what they are doing.

Having the whole state apparatus in their hands, these people have been shaping our taste for about thirty years through art schools, cultural centres, museums and universities, where they have cleverly placed their propaganda agents. So much so, that they have even become the real prescribers of purchases in our Museums through the positions they occupy within the Committees of the Friends of the Museums of Contemporary Art.

https://amis.centrepompidou.fr/conseil-dadministration

After World War II, the Americans colonized us not only with their Coca-Cola and chewing gum, but also with their cultural products such as Action Painting, Pop-Art, Conceptual Art, which are still imposed on us today without our knowledge, not only in France, but in all European countries, a capitalism that has been able to make the most of the post-war period. It is they, with New York in particular, who have reaped the benefits of the dynamics of contemporary art production, endorsing its voluntarist image and all its financial benefits. It took more than 45 years before Paris