Contemporary art that "doesn't make sense" has become something of a topic of conversation.
Sure, there are bananas stuck to the wall with tape, polka dots painted on the wall, and so on, but what is the meaning behind them?
First of all, let's pick up some of these "meaningless" works of art that are often singled out and consider the meanings behind them.

1) Maurizio Cattelan, "Comedian," a $16 million "banana.

The work "Comedian" by Maurizio Cattelan was exhibited at Art Basel Miami in 2019. It is a genuine contemporary artwork, with real bananas simply attached to the wall with gray Scotch tape.
Cattelan had the idea for this work for about a year, and every time he traveled, he brought bananas with him to display in his hotel room. At first, he was thinking of making a sculpture in the shape of a banana, but after making several models using resin and bronze, he finally decided to make a real banana as it is.

On the first day of the fair, two editions of the work were purchased by private collectors for $120,000 (approximately 13 million yen).
A third edition was reserved by the museum for $150,000 (approximately 16 million yen).
The purchase of the piece will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and an installation manual by Catelan.
Emmanuel Perrotin, owner of Gallery Perrotin, which provided the exhibition booth, said that the "purchase" is only a part of the work and that "without the certificate, the work is only a material representation. Without the certificate, the work is only a material expression. The fact that someone bought it makes it a work of art.

However, on the day before the final day of the fair, a shocking incident occurred.
David Datuna, an artist based in New York, peeled a banana off the wall and ate it.
After the incident, Datuna named his act a "Hungry Artist" performance and released a series of videos on Instagram. He said, "I love Maurizio Cattelan's work and his installations. Very delicious," he commented.
No legal charges were pursued against Datuna, but Cattelan's work was removed on the final day of the fair. The decision was made out of concern that it would be impossible to control the entry of visitors, who were mixed on both sides of the issue.
The series of incidents, which ended in a comedy of sorts, as the title suggests, with the work being eaten, truly shows the characteristics of contemporary art, which is built on a very fragile structure.

(2) Just a Canvas with Incisions? Lucio Fontana, "Spatial Concept

Fontana was an Italian-Argentine artist active in the 20th century.
He demanded that viewers perceive the canvas itself as an object, on which many artists' paintings are still painted today. He develops his "Spatialist Manifesto" production by making sharp cuts and holes in the canvas.
This was an act of trying to take a more critical look at what Western painters had been trying to accomplish by painting something, and not just some form on a canvas anymore.
That is, to reproduce a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. Fontana's paintings are an attempt to capture the elusive images of various landscapes and movements that we see in reality, and to make them last forever through the use of paint.
We can think of Fontana as having cut through the virtual three-dimensional space created within the canvas by tearing it open. By doing so, he has brought to many people the perspective of "pictorial expression that has been confined to a two-dimensional cloth" and "escaping from it to develop works in a real three-dimensional space.
Fontana made the following statement.

As a painter, when I drill a hole in the canvas, I am not trying to make a painting.

I want it to expand infinitely beyond the enclosed space of the painting, to create a new dimension in art, to connect it to the universe.

(3) "Children's Doodles," Cy Twombly, "Untitled (NYC)

This work, which appears to be nothing more than a simple doodle on a blackboard, sold for $70 million (about $8.4 billion in currency at the time) at a 2015 Sotheby's New York auction.
He has created other works that appear to be wildly scrawled poetic statements or an accumulation of detailed scribbles.
His paintings, which at first glance appear to be unintelligible, are actually his own reinterpretations of various myths and stories as resources. For example, the work below is said to depict Achilles lamenting the death of Patroclus.
His style, in which he paints letters but then roughly drowns them out and leaves traces of his own physical actions and their instability on the canvas, can be compared to the way we ourselves are exposed to uncertain information on a daily basis and have to make subjective decisions at every turn.
Twombly's gestures, which seemed so indecisive and poor, may be a reflection of our own gestures.

(4) Just a square? Malevich, "Black Square

Kazimir Malevich, who exhibited this work, was a Soviet painter in 1920.
Malevich was creating stage design for a Futurist opera production. Futurism was the name of an avant-garde art group whose works were very avant-garde, consisting of meaningless words, unconnected plots, and dissonant background music.
Malevich, who at the time believed that "new art must be non-objective," also held that the absolute value of this stage art was not to depict any particular scenery or figures, but something abstract and geometric. Malevich called it "absolutism = suprematism," and produced paintings in which elements were reduced to the utmost limit.
The mere "black square" does not represent anything, but exists only as a "black square. The absoluteness of the painting is connected to the iconic absolutism of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is tied to the location of the room where this work was first exhibited, a corner of the ceiling.
The painting, simplified to the extreme, fit in with the Orthodox tradition, which abhors idolatry, and moreover, it fit in with the period in art history when abstraction appeared in a fitting manner. It was in this context that Malevich was appreciated.

(5) Just a Calendar? Atsushi Kawahara, "Date Painting

Kawahara On Kawahara's "Date Painting" series of paintings looks like it depicts nothing more than a date.
Kawahara was an artist who traveled around the world, creating works in a completely different manner from his previous works.
The series is based on a simple rule: Kawahara, who changed his base of operations every day and stayed in different countries, would paint the day's date in the local language on a canvas using acrylic paint, and place it inside a packing box with the day's newspaper purchased at that location inside. The rules included a note that the work would always begin and end at some point in the day and would be destroyed if it was not finished after 12:00 AM.
In this way, he completed about 3,000 Date Paintings over a period of about 40 years.
Other messages included "I am still alive" telegrams to friends and "I Got Up at .... (I Got Up at 00:00)" to friends by mail.
Although this motivation is difficult for ordinary people to understand, the concept of "time" is common to all of these unique actions. In contrast to Lucio Fontana, who aimed to expand the "concept of space," Kawahara sought a meaning beyond a single two-dimensional work, an object that occupies a certain space, through the time it represents, the range of time, and the eternity of time.




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