A billionaire recently paid $6.2 million for a banana duct-taped to a canvas. (See the link above.) The person who assembled the taped banana called this “art,” a judgement affirmed by “experts.”

I’m here to tell you the following: The assumption that a rich businessman is intelligent is, by this example, proven false. Many a businessman/woman is merely cunning, that’s all. This particular rich dude apparently appreciates the related cunning of conmen who call themselves artists and get away with it. Else why would he have spent all that money on a banana? The cost of the canvas and the tape being negligible, the guy forked over $6.2 million FOR A BANANA.

He later ate it.

In the above video, I eat a banana (purchased at Trader Joe’s for 23 cents) in ten bites. If this were the banana purchased by the stupid rich guy, each bite would represent $620,000 worth of fruit. (I underestimated the size of the bites required to amount to a total of ten, so the last two bites were whoppers! Sorry about the eating noises. I had no idea the mic was that sensitive.)

This incident is the peak of postmodern pretension to culture. Postmodernism is the grandchild of Idealism, which is itself a child of the so-called Enlightenment. In essence, Idealism asserts that the real world is actually created by us. There is no “nature.” There are no identities. (This is why contemporary “philosophers” reject metaphysics, which is the science of identity.) Idealists create ideas and concepts out of whole clothe, then name them as they wish. My readers will recognize this last step in the process as Nominalism.

To the postmodernist, then, we cannot identify “art” (or anything else) as having a particular nature. It is simply whatever we choose to call art (or anything else). This, however, leaves the door open to common people who wish to call their child’s finger paintings “art,” so the fiction is established that only university-trained “experts” can tell what constitutes art and what does not. No justification is given. It’s simply part of the postmodern con, and fits snugly with the centuries-old notion that things are not what they are in themselves, but exist only as the concepts we apply to them.

The con has been going on since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal in an art show and titled it “Fountain.” The musical equivalent of this was John Cage’s “musical composition” called 6’33”, which required the performer to do nothing for six minutes and thirty-three seconds. The “music” was supposedly the ambient sounds of the performance hall.

Philosophy — metaphysics — says this: all things have particular natures. Bring metaphysics to bear on a urinal or crowd noise and all you have are a urinal and crowd noise. Eliminate metaphysics, elevate Nominalism, and they become forms of art.

Of course, the Nominalists would never call poison food, nor would they say that an aircraft designed without reference to the nature of aerodynamics can fly. They cannot do these things because material reality denies their possibilities. Serve poison as food — denying the inherently nutritional nature of food — and die. Attempt to fly in a craft designed against the nature of flight, and die once more. Postmodernists are unashamedly hypocritical on this point. They apply their nonsense only where they know that no material results can contradict them. Nobody dies looking at a urinal that is supposed to be art. No rich businessman croaks when spending millions for a banana.

But there is more to life than material existence. When art and music are degraded and said to be anything a conman with PhD behind his name says it is, the spiritual side of humanity suffers. And this is where the line is drawn. Either one comprehends that life is more than our material selves, or one does not. The latter will be comfortable with postmodernism’s notion that ideas and concepts have no inherent natures, that art and justice and freedom and love can be anything we want them to be. For those who perceive humanity’s spiritual nature (that word again), art and justice and freedom and love and everything else have certain natures, or essences, and our job as humans is to grasp those concepts as they exist, and neither to add to nor subtract from them.

We are here to let existence in, not to impose ourselves on it.

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PS — I have decided to call the video above a work of art. If you view it, please PayPal me $100. Thank you.