Comedian is a tuck. We all get that, right? it’s a phallic object held in place with duck tape. Tucking is a way of putting your penis, should you be burdened with one, out of the way for reasons of comfort, safety, or fashion. Two pairs of underwear, one too small, is a good way of doing it. Tape may be more professional but it’s not something you want to do on skin that is less than perfectly hairless.
Is Comedian really a tuck? The death of the author says yes. It’s an incongruous conceptual hook behind a gravitational lens of price. The fish-eye effects of the latter pull all kinds of forms out from the less-than-a-dollar-of-materials. To focus the attention and spur cognition like this is one definition of art. That people hate it is one of modern art.
The market for Comedian is almost certainly not looking at it and trying to mentally calculate how long it is until they need to start worrying about the logistics of going to the bathroom. They are much more likely to be thinking about their burn rate and how to roll back DEI without losing the furries in the server room.
Executive Officers of venture-capital-backed startups spin straw into gold through the power of their imagination and personality. This doesn’t really come through in the GANTT charts, though, and nobody wants a Soviet leader-style oil portrait of themselves in the boardroom any more. Which is a pity as those are very easy to churn out in Procreate. And Warhol isn’t returning anyone’s calls at the moment.
The executive, or managerial, ego first found its reflection flattered in Duchamp’s bureaucratic artistic transsubstantiations. It should have been exhausted in the filing cabinets and contracts of Conceptualism. Or the branding and outsourcing of neoconceptualism. But the subtractive (which is to say critical) impetus of the joint-stock corporation isn’t going to stop fluffing the managerial ego any time soon. It needs someone to carry the blame.
The sitter who commissions a portrait wishes their ego to be flattered by the resulting image. If not visually then conceptually, and always as an exercise in and demonstration of acuity of some kind. But sitting takes time, and requires a service agreements that doesn’t sufficiently privilege the sitter in venture capital’s understanding of employment relationships.
An image is a dimensional reduction of a model. It needn’t be diagrammatic or complete. It can be continuous and/or lossy. And it needn’t be visual in referent or depiction. Comedian is a miniature of the CEO’s organizational being. It is a portrait of it. Not in the sense of its immediate sculptural materials but in the sense of how they have been assembled, realised as property, promoted, and sold. It’s process art, not sentimental anthropomorphization through absence.
The banana on the wall is the hook on which it all hangs. It’s a door, not a window. If you’re in on the joke you’re laughing all the way to the museum.
This is what makes Comedian worth the money to those it is worth the money to. They get to see themselves as they know they are. Do they know that? I don’t know.
It’s still a tuck, though.