This year’s Art Basel show in Miami featured a real banana duct taped to an exhibition wall. It sold for an unbelievable 120,000 dollars. The artist called his art piece(?) “Comedian”. Sometime afterward, a NY performance artist ripped the banana right off the wall and ate it. No problem. They just replaced it with another. (But, obviously, not the original, I might add).

As a visual artist myself, I’m a believer that art somehow must be more than just mere exhibition of any arbitrary object, seemingly possessing no artist merit or consideration. But that might be too restrictive. “Can a banana taped to a wall be art? Must art be beautiful? Creative? Emotive?

“A banana taped to a wall may not embody human creativity, but it may evoke some feelings, good or bad,” U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola wrote in his ruling last week. “In any event, a banana taped to a wall recalls Marshall McLuhan’s definition of art — ‘anything you can get away with.’ ”

This seemingly non-art piece (to me anyway) got me to thinking: What can I do with the image to give it some validly? Of course, the banana shape itself is reminiscent of a penis. So, with Photoshop, I substituted Michelangelo’s David’s penis with that taped banana image photo. Apparently, Michelangelo rendered David’s penis smaller than normal (so as not to grab the major attention of the viewer, some critics claim).

But I’d say the idiom, “The man has some big balls,” aptly describes the courage and conviction that the young shepherd David possessed in his volunteering to confront with the giant Goliath, regardless of the fact that Jehovah God was on David’s side. (I’ve obviously taken some artist license here in using a banana/penis to sit in proxy for big balls). Thank you very much.

Perhaps my reconfiguration using a trite banana would have been more tolerable and appropriate for the two concerned parents of a couple of fifth grade art students that were shown Michelangelo’s “naked” David, in all his radiant, (small) genital glory–without their consent. Those parents claimed that genital exposure constituted pornography. I’m mostly in agreement with DeSantis not wanting to expose our young school age children to the LBGYQ+ indoctrinations, but a photograph of a marble, lifeless sculpture, no matter the human undersize of his penis, is one “woke” over the line sweet Jesus to me. As a result of the art teacher’s unsolicited initiative and the parents causing such a stir, the principal of the school resigned.

In conclusion, I’d say where an object d art is specifically exhibited can carry as much artistic weight as the art object itself. And in this case, I’d say attempting to play it safe with a simple banana instead of a realistic penis (regardless of its modest size), in order not to offend anyone, exponentially captures more of the viewer’s attention than originally intended. In this case, you can’t see the forest because of the tree directly in front of you!