You are standing in front of The Peach.
This work is a classic example of explicit art: art where every meaning is explained and fixed. Nothing is left to guess.
The author put four meanings into this work.
Everything else is just guessing. It has nothing to do with the work.
The author wants to talk about quoting in art. Where does copying end and quoting begin? And when is it just a coincidence?
When you see this peach, you probably think: this is a clear reference to the famous banana that Maurizio Cattelan taped to a wall. Or even a cheap copy of it.
And yes, here too something is taped to a wall. But are the two works really so alike? Let's look closer.
Maurizio used a real fruit. This one is made of papier-mâché.
Here, too, a fruit is taped to a wall.
The banana is a symbol of the Western world, and it spread around the world from west to east. The peach travelled the other way, from east to west. Its botanical name, Prunus persica, means "Persian plum".
The banana is clearly a male, phallic symbol. The peach is the opposite: soft and feminine.
Maurizio used one piece of tape. Here the peach is held by a grid of tape.
So it's four against one.
But even so, anyone who tapes anything to a wall after 5 December 2019 is quoting Maurizio. And that is what makes him great.
The tape that holds the peach is made of plastic. It stands for the so-called plastic world. We take this idea from the songs of Yegor Letov.
Simply put, the plastic world is capitalism at its worst. And the peach — even though it is made of papier-mâché — stands for the living world. Simply put, the world of art.
Now look at how the peach is fixed. The strips of tape make a kind of cage. This is no accident. The world of art is a prisoner of the plastic world, the world of money.
But is it really?
Let's turn to another modern classic, Victor Pelevin. In his novel iPhuck 10, he offers a simple and elegant way to tell whether something is art. It seems to be the only correct way. Let's try his method on Cattelan's banana.
If you buy a banana and tape it to a wall, it is worth two dollars at most. And that's if you bought it in Limassol. Anywhere else it's even cheaper. But the famous banana was sold for $120,000.
A banana cannot cost $120,000. A work of art can. So the person who bought it decided, at the very moment of buying, that this was not just a banana. It was a work of art.
This means that money decides what is art and what is not.
Art is a prisoner of the plastic world. It obeys this world completely. And it is this world that gives art its licence to be art.
The third meaning is about how we look at the world, and about the labels we put on things.
For example, many people think horoscopes are completely useless.
Papier-mâché is just paper glued together. For this work, the author used only horoscopes cut out of newspapers.
Science says your star sign has no effect on your character. Horoscopes are generally seen as useless. But here they became papier-mâché. So they are not useless after all. They can be put to good use.
If something seems useless to you, think again. Maybe you are just using it the wrong way.