How a duct-taped banana exposed the death of beauty

Chances are that you’ve disagreed at least once with a family member, friend, or co-worker about what counts as “true” or “real” art.

This usually plays out as a right vs. left divide. People on the right are often suspicious of art that pushes too far beyond familiar social boundaries. The left, on the other hand, embraces innovation and art that breaks with what’s traditionally accepted. In reality, these attitudes share the same nontraditional view of art. The tension has been unfolding for the last 500 years. It’s the story of modern art, born from a fundamentally disordered relationship to art itself.

A modern art museum looks less like a celebration of art and more like a graveyard.

Imagine you and a friend are on a trip, and you decide to visit the Guggenheim art museum. There, you both see “Comedian,” a piece by artist Maurizio Cattelan that sold for $6 million at auction. Before you is a banana duct-taped to a wall — that’s it.

Unable to suspend disbelief, you say, “How is that art?”

Your friend replies, “Art is subjective. Who are you to say this isn’t art?”

Simply all you can say is, “I cannot see beauty or skill in this.”

So your friend rejoins you in a vacuous, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But you wouldn’t understand. Anyway, this is a commentary. It’s about the concept of the artwork.”

Critics beat the “Comedian” to death not because of its unique absurdity but because of its recency. The Dadaist art movement has pulled stunts like this one for more than 100 years. It reminds me of the infamous “Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp: a urinal with a signature. It was exhibited 108 years ago.

But how did we get here?

To understand how we arrived at this predicament in Western art, we must examine our relationship to it, how we receive art, how we engage with it, and its history.

A new understanding

The modern period marks a departure from the pre-modern world (i.e., year 1500 A.D.). It’s a turning point in history unlike any before. Everything changed, including the ways in which people perceive reality. Gone are the days of enchantment. Now we have rationality. A Faustian bargain was made.

“What is art?”

When someone asks that question, what immediately comes to mind? Most people think of painting, drawing, sculptures — things that belong in a museum. But this modern way of thinking about art is novel, foreign to people in the pre-modern world. Calling that era “pre-modern” is misleading because it makes up the vast majority of human history. The real anomaly is the modern period.

Seen from this perspective, a modern art museum looks less like a celebration of art and more like a graveyard.

For the ancient and medieval person, art was integrated into life itself — not separated from it. Art was less a noun than a verb, something one did. People didn’t create art; they “art-ed” or were “art-ing.” Art was a process of participation. Put simply: There was no distinction between “art” and “craft” as we think of it today.

Modern people haven’t abandoned this concept entirely, but it no longer sits at the forefront of how we think about art. It survives in words like “artisan,” referring to bakers, tailors, and other craftsmen. It lingers in expressions like “the art of watchmaking” or “the art of conversation.” Even commercial marketing borrows it. Products marketed as “artisan” purport to distinguish craftsmanship from mass-produced commodities.

In the pre-modern world, everyday life was shaped by art. Daily clothes, a dining room table, the family home, the local church — from the lowliest object to the most sacred — all were made with care and beauty. On one level, this is easy to explain: Everything was handmade, and because possessions were less numerous, people valued and cared for them, passing them down through generations.

RELATED: How modern art became a freak show — and why only God can fix it

skynesher/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Naturally, if you own something that long, you want it to be beautiful.

But more fundamentally, all of these objects fit into the same pattern that we call “art”: the gathering and ordering of particular items in a way that speaks to human perception. A finely crafted dining table binds a family together more than a folding card table ever could. The liturgical cup used for the Eucharist is fashioned from precious metals and decorated with deliberate symbols, while the wine glasses at the family table, though well made, are more austere.

Each object bears an artfulness appropriate to its purpose, something obvious to the pre-modern mind.

This older way of living with art is not completely lost on us today. It still exists, though less prominently and increasingly in decline. Yet one demotion of art is almost extinct in the modern world, surviving only in tight-knit communities, ethnic traditions, and older generations. It may not immediately register as “art” at first glance, but folk dances, dinner parties, storytelling, and other forms of social ritual are actually higher forms of art than material objects. They are art as shared life.

Material art matters, too, but it mainly points us toward the deeper loss.

A transformative transition

One simple historical fact makes the difference clear: Pre-modern artists didn’t sign their work.

The transition to modernity was, as in so many areas of life, a pact with the devil. Technical mastery was gained, but the spiritual core was left void. The Enlightenment promised reason, science, and progress, so it seemed that humanity could finally cast off the shadow of the past and secure its future. But the human condition didn’t change.

What convenience gave with one hand, it robbed from the soul with the other.

Industrialization, mass production, plastics, and now the digital age each dealt successive blows to our once-integrated relationship with art. In the pre-modern world, art was an integrated part of life. Modernity replaced this with self-consciousness. Art became not a relationship but a category. Crafts were dissected under the microscope of science, refined to new levels of technical brilliance. The results were often dazzling: new techniques, perspectives, and ways of depicting the world.

But the cost was steep.

As long as people exist, art will exist. But the toothpaste is out of the tube. There is no going back.

This story unfolds in art history. By the late medieval era, traditional iconography, steeped in centuries of sacred meaning, was being reshaped by artists like Duccio and Giotto. The Renaissance largely abandoned these forms, with titans like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci leading the way. By the 1570s, El Greco was embedding sexually transgressive and even blasphemous subtleties into his work.

This trajectory continued, sometimes slowly and other times all at once. But the pattern was clear: identity fragmented, transcendence severed, innovation pursued for its own sake. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the seeds had fully flowered. Soviet brutalism imposed tyranny through pattern and abstraction, while Dadaism dissolved meaning altogether until art and non-art were indistinguishable.

The result? Today, we argue with friends about whether a banana duct-taped to a wall is “art.” Art has become commentary on commentary, detached from human experience, and reduced to little more than propaganda.

Today, modern art is defined by its fixation on individual idiosyncrasies. At its extreme, it becomes nothing more than the subjective whims of the isolated self disconnected from reality.

What can be done?

Does this mean that culture and beauty itself have reached their end? Thankfully not.

As long as people exist, art will exist. But the toothpaste is out of the tube. There is no going back. We cannot rewind the clock to some imagined golden age. That sentiment is not only impractical, but it’s impossible.

We are where we find ourselves today because of the past, so such a return would lead us back to today. The path forward, then, must connect the present to the past, the new and the old, weaving together the modern and the pre-modern.

The case of Tarkovsky

One bridge across the divide is found in the work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors and screenwriters of all time.

Unbeknownst to him, his life was a crossroads: Raised in the Soviet Union under militant atheism and the revolutionary spirit of modernism, yet he was an Orthodox Christian, steeped in the traditions of the pre-modern world. His father was a poet, and his mother was a lover of literature. Tarkovsky was perfectly positioned to bring the old and new into dialogue.

His art is a call to repentance, an offering and pleasing aroma to the Lord.

Tarkovsky saw modernity clearly: “Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.”

The heart of Tarkovsky’s vision was simple: art as prayer. He admitted that Dostoevsky — another Russian and Orthodox Christian who wrestled with the sacred and the existential — was the greatest artist. Tarkovsky wore this influence on his sleeve. His films probe life, death, suffering, and the search for the miraculous and meaning. He once wrote, “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

In his films, Tarkovsky magnifies the specific experiences of the individual, yet he always frames them in transcendence. He gathers the unique and lifts it upward. But he does not erase human subjectivity. Rather, he redeems it.

As he put it:

When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the “dirt” of the world. On the contrary! The artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution … the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

In this way, Tarkovsky reverses modernity’s desecrations and successfully connects the modern and pre-modern. He uses the individual to orient us toward God, a spiritual transcendence of sorts. Where the modern world has made the holy profane, Tarkovsky, in a Christ-like reversal, makes the profane holy.

His art is a call to repentance, an offering and pleasing aroma to the Lord.

“The artist is always a servant and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice,” he once said.

The way ahead

What does this mean for us? It means embodying art in our daily lives.

You don’t need to be a professional artist. Do things deliberately and with care. A mother preparing a meal gathers the fruit of local soil into the higher good of uniting her family. A father telling a bedtime story practices one of the most ancient and enduring arts.

But the key is purpose. When art is done for its own sake — or worse, for the sake of self — it collapses and is degraded. A meal made not to bind the family but only to satisfy hunger soon degenerates into the TV dinner. A story rushed through without care decays into mass-produced entertainment stripped of substance.

If this is true of everyday arts, how much more of the fine arts? A painter who works only from private interiority — detached from a holy purpose — quickly drifts into solipsism, creating images disconnected from reality. An iconographer, by contrast, paints for veneration, anchoring a community’s worship in something beyond themselves. One isolates; the other binds together. One closes in on the self; the other points beyond it.

Art created for no other purpose than for the self is disconnected from all and devoid of any real power or meaning.

There are signs of hope. Traditional religious communities, specifically liturgical Christian traditions (like the Orthodox Church), maintain and produce work of depth and beauty: the ritualistic, iconography, music, homiletics, and so on — all built around a sincere Christian framework. The Orthodox Arts Journal showcases this revival. And in addition to liturgical arts, it has begun integrating beauty into popular art forms like graphic novels, fairy tales, literature, and clothing.

Revival, however, can’t remain institutional. The hard work of beauty must be done in your own home and life.

Modern technology allows anyone to become an artist in any field. But the burden of self-awareness requires you to carve out time and put in real effort. And it’s not enough to create beauty yourself. You must also reject the cheap slop offered to you and choose real craftsmanship.

The road is narrow and hard. But if you want to be delivered from the hell of modern art, go make a pleasing sacrifice to the Lord.