One achievement of the avant-garde has been to show that anything can be art. There are numerous memorable examples spanning the century from Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), a banana duct-taped to a wall, sold at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million in November 2024. But the fact that the readymade and other forms of deskilled art have become an accepted form of artistic practice should not detract from their enduring and intriguing novelty. It is difficult to think of other social forms where the same latitude prevails, where anything may count as a token within the practice in question. Gift-giving might be one example. You can make a gift of anything, and the fact that it is a gift will probably enhance its value for the recipient. But it doesn’t add value to the object for anyone else, let alone economic value. At least until the development of crypto, which seems to have managed a similar feat, art has seemed unique in this respect. And this raises a question: why is there the amount of art that there is? How can a social practice in which value can be extracted virtually from thin air succeed? On the other hand, why, given that art can be anything, isn’t there a lot more of it?
Traditional aesthetic theories proved insufficiently elastic to account for the possibility that anything could become art. In contrast, institutional theories of art suggested that although anything, or almost anything, might be art, it could become so only in relationship to an artworld. The concept of the artworld was developed by Arthur Danto to explain how it was that something could be art while being identical to something which was not. His answer was that ‘the difference . . . is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is’.footnote1
This account implied that all that was required to turn an everyday object into a work of art was a conducive ‘conceptual atmosphere’ and that it is participation in this ‘discourse of reasons’ that ‘defines the artworld’.footnote2 George Dickie’s version of the theory placed greater emphasis on the actual social networks—artists, gallerists, curators, critics, auction houses, museums, academic institutions—that collectively make something into art (in Dickie’s terms, ‘confer the status of a candidate for appreciation’) within a given society.footnote3 In a world where anything can become art, but not everything is art, the institutional theory is probably the most serviceable in that it is not easily disproved. There is nothing that is generally considered to be art that the institutional theory cannot account for, and there is nothing that is not art that could not be re-appraised.
On the other hand, the institutional theory explains very little. Not only does it fail to specify the criteria by which qualitative judgements are made, but it ignores the quantitative dimension altogether. If the artworld is able to make art out of anything, then there would appear to be clear incentives, whatever the criteria invoked, to maximize the quantity of art. Not only is art often considered, especially by those involved in the artworld, to be an intrinsic good, but having more art would mean that the artworld could expand as well, and, given that art objects are often worth more than their non-art equivalents, that there was an economic basis for this growth. The artworld has indeed expanded enormously, and there are now museums of contemporary art in many cities of the world, but it has, nevertheless, not expanded as much as it might have done, given the theoretically limitless potential for growth.
Noting that the price of Warhol’s plywood Brillo boxes was 2x10footnote3 that of their real-life counterparts, Danto rhetorically asks: ‘Is this man a kind of Midas, turning whatever he touches into the gold of pure art?’footnote4 On his account the answer is no, it is not Warhol who is Midas but the artworld. And while it is not necessarily the case that everything that becomes art has aesthetic value, nor that everything with aesthetic value has economic value, the artworld is designed to effect the transformation. However, although anything can be art, and art can have almost any economic value, it is not the case that anything can be made to have any value by becoming art. Auction houses are not full of readymades selling for millions of pounds. On the contrary, they are so rare as to generate headlines whenever they occur. If the institutional theory of art is to maintain plausibility, then it needs to explain why the artworld, unlike Midas, has exercised an uncommon degree of self-restraint, or else why its Midas touch is so unreliable.
Institutional theories of art have no evaluative principles of their own, but rather point towards other theories to explain the underlying logic of the artworld in determining what art is and what counts as good art. To what extent can these other theories be of help? Theories of modernism usually work off a conjunction of two things: the existence of some sort of value, convention or tradition and the negation, critique or calling into question of that value or institution by the modernist or avant-garde artist. Variants include classical modernism in which advanced art in any field negates the specific tradition or medium from which it comes, and the neo-avant-garde in which the artist questions not the medium but the institution of art itself.footnote5
This is recognizably the framework within which Sotheby’s presented Cattelan’s Comedian. Encouraged by Cattelan himself, who is quoted as saying that ‘To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value’, Sotheby’s presented the work as something to be valued for its interrogation of value: ‘Comedian’s theoretical origins can thus be traced back to the Duchampian readymade, the genesis of a larger ontological schism which decentred craft, rarity and technical mastery in favour of the conceptual value assigned by the artist.’ In this account, the banana represents ‘the apex of a hundred-year-long, intellectual yet irreverent interrogation of contemporary art’s conceptual limits’ which includes Manzoni, González-Torres and Koons, as well as Duchamp. ‘Evoking and advancing the strategies of his predecessors with sardonic and subversive wit’, Cattelan is said to have prompted the world ‘to reconsider how we define art, and the value we seek in it’.footnote6 