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    Who’s Laughing Now? Banana-as-Art Sells for $6.2 Million at Sotheby’s

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    A conceptual artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, “Comedian,” is just a fruit-stand banana taped on the wall. But 7 bidders were biting. It went to a crypto entrepreneur. A banana that for years has stirred controversy in the art world sold for $6.2 million with fees at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction on Wednesday night. It became what is arguably the most expensive fruit in the world — though it will likely be tossed in a couple days.The banana is the star of a 2019 conceptual artwork, “Comedian,” by the noted prankster Maurizio Cattelan, which is intended to be duct-taped onto the wall. It comes with a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions for owners to replace the banana — if they wish — whenever it rots. Five minutes of rapid bidding ended when the Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun placed the winning bid, besting six other rivals, which experts said was a sign that even a struggling market would spend big on spectacle.Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur and art collector, shown in New York City in 2019. He is now the owner of a $6.2 million banana.Steven Ferdman/Getty Images “Returns in the market have been flat or decreasing over the last decade,” said Michael Moses, who tracks the investment potential of artworks for clients. “It’s a fascinating asset because you can get so much joy from it that people are willing to accept lower returns. Joy is not something to be messed with.”Indeed, Sun said in a statement that the Cattelan work “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.” Sun, who watched the auction from Hong Kong, added that “in the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Long Wave: Unearthing the real story of Black voters at the US election

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      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I had a chat with Lauren N Williams, the deputy editor for race and equity at the Guardian US, about the country’s election results and the role Black voters played. I wanted to discuss the reported swing among Black voters to Donald Trump, which seemed pretty significant. However, talking to her made me see things from a different angle. But first, the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenBarbados PM invites Trump for climate talks | At the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mia Mottley told the Guardian that she would “find common purpose in saving the planet” with the president-elect of the US. Trump’s re-election has aggravated fears about the future of climate action.Malcolm X family sues over assassination | The family of Malcolm X have filed a $100m federal lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department over his death. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies knew of the plot to assassinate the civil rights leader in 1965 but did not act to stop it.Kenyans embrace standup comedy | Comedy is booming in Kenya, with new venues and a fresh wave of standups picking up the mic. As our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, reports: “Topics encompass daily life and the entire range of challenges that beset the country … as performers tap into the power of standup to make people laugh about their difficulties.”Steve McQueen reveals cancer treatment | The Oscar-winning film director and artist Steve McQueen underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. The Blitz producer, whose father died of the disease in 2006, has helped raise awareness of the higher risk of prostate cancer among Black men, and directed a short campaign film, Embarassed.Evaristos connect at Rio book festival | The British Booker prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, met for the first time at Festa Literária das Periferias in Rio de Janeiro last Wednesday. The two Evaristos, who are unrelated, spoke on a panel discussion about their shared surname and its ties to Brazil and the transatlantic slave trade.In depth: A Black political shift – math or myth?View image in fullscreenThe headlines seemed clear: Trump’s support among Black voters had soared. In the US election this month, some media reported that he doubled his share of the Black male vote and won more Black voters than any other Republican in almost 50 years. This was history! Well, not quite, Lauren N Williams tells me. “The numbers overall are almost identical to how people voted in 2020,” she says. According to exit polls, Black voters turned out for Harris at 85%, and for Joe Biden at 87%. The only real difference is that the number of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris dropped slightly, while Black male Trump support increased slightly from 19% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. But, she says, more than 7 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden. While Trump picked up more Black male voters than he did back then – a detail heavily emphasised in media coverage before and after the election – the prevailing narrative does not account for the fact that: “It’s not only this switch to Trump,” Lauren says. People stayed home, or people voted third party. If you don’t look at the whole picture, then yes, you arrive at the narrative that Black people are swinging one way.”Why was this contextualisation missing from post-election analysis? Because it doesn’t make for a sexy story. “It’s really interesting to people when you have a character like Trump and he attracts folks who you wouldn’t normally think would be into his policies and persona,” Lauren says. “It’s typical that white male voters vote for him overwhelmingly – but what’s not typical is when people of colour do so. For a lot of news media, that is a really attractive story.”I asked her about the viral clip of Barack Obama scolding Black male voters for seemingly not turning out as strongly for Harris as they did for him when he ran. Even I flinched when I saw it, and thought, wow, the Democrats must really be in trouble. But, according to Lauren, the emergency button on that narrative had so constantly been pressed by poll analysts (a narrative that, if I may, the Guardian avoided), that even the Democrats panicked and fell for it, sending Obama to “finger-wag” at prospective voters.‘Complicating the narrative’View image in fullscreenIt’s still interesting to me that a candidate like Trump, with his record on racism, could win over more Black men, even in context. But Lauren calls my attention to a far bigger and more interesting story that has been reduced to a footnote of the election: Harris won almost the entire Black female vote. “If you had white women voting 90%-plus for a candidate, you would not hear the end of that story. It would be endlessly curious and interesting and fascinating. We lose a lot by not applying that same level of curiosity to the ways that other demographics vote.” I can see that this also applies to Black men, three-quarters of whom still voted Democrat. “This story could have been ‘look at the power that Black voters wield’, but that’s just not the American narrative.”And what we lose is a big deal. By writing off those who voted for Harris as doing so simply out of blind loyalty, the reasons for Trump’s victory risk becoming detached from reality. Another broad headline after the election was that there was actually nothing sinister going on – it was “just” the economy. But the Black people who voted for Harris are disproportionately working class, Lauren says, and have made informed decisions despite their economic status because they are accustomed to making compromises and always thinking about “the greater good”. “In the discussions that a lot of the media has about the working class, the undertone is that they are only talking about the white working class”, because considering Black voters as part of the American working class “complicates the narrative”. People would have to reckon with the fact that “Black Americans who experience disfranchisement and a huge racial wealth gap were not wooed by this idea of economic anxiety”.Anti-racism has fallen out of fashionView image in fullscreen“Complicating the narrative” raises the question: why is it that white people are seemingly more anxious about the economy than Black people who are less well off? There is little interest in the answer to this question, says Lauren. “I think people have decided that race is boring,” she says, even though it’s “at the root of so much. Any time we talk about identity politics, we’re talking about people of colour, even though Trump ran on white male identity.” By only treating white people as rational economic voters, we pay “an undue amount of attention” to factors outside race, even though it’s “right up there”. I have definitely noticed a shift since Trump’s first election victory eight years ago. The myriad “white rage” takes of 2016 are thin on the ground this time, despite Trump’s 2024 campaign being even more explicitly racist.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA growing backlash to Black Lives Matter also played a role. “We shifted so far after George Floyd,” Lauren says, “whether we saw corporations – symbolic or not – changing their behaviour and relationships to racism and people were pissed about that. Not everyone was on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon.”What next for Black Americans?View image in fullscreenIf this is how the election analysis has played out, it does not bode well for the next four years. Perhaps we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s “appeal” to the white working class and continued disregard for the millions of Black people who didn’t vote for him, who now have to live under a regime that “aims to dismantle federal anti-discrimination policies”. Lauren’s approach is to widen the historical lens. “One thing that has helped me is just remembering that we have been here before. Any time there is progress, there is always a backlash to it. One step forward, two steps back. That is peak American history.”As a journalist, Lauren says showing Black lives as fuller than they are often depicted in the mainstream media, insisting on art, culture, and “the Black rodeo down in Mississippi”, is the way to plough ahead. In other words: if you’re a glass-half-full person, which I am, it’s focusing on that one step forward and then the next one. Or, to borrow from Harris, “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning”.What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

      I am broadly not a fan of beauty pageants. But I can’t lie, the variations of African dress during this year’s Miss Universe had me mesmerised. It’s impossible to pick a favourite as each one was more stunning the next. Nesrine

      The Afrikan Alien mixtape by Pa Salieu is going platinum on my phone. I love his musings on family, alienation and freedom (he was released from a 21-month prison stint in September). Jason

      I know we are at a saturation point with social media, but hear me out: Bluesky is like the old, less toxic Twitter, and has a handy way of grouping users so you can follow by theme. I mass followed Blacksky, a selection of interesting Black accounts on the app. Check it out. Nesrine

      I can’t wait to catch Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in the film Wicked. She is a generational talent and I can’t stop watching her perform an R&B rendition of The Sound of Music on The Tonight Show. Jason
      Black catalogueView image in fullscreenWhen the prominent Fani-Kayode family fled the civil war in Nigeria, the UK gained a curious and radical artist and photographer in Rotimi Fani-Kayode, famous for his portraits exploring race, culture, sexuality, desire and pain. He had a short career, with much of his work accomplished between 1983 and his death from Aids-related complications in London in 1989. Fani-Kayode was a member of the Brixton Artists Collective and a founding member of the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), and much of Rotimi’s never-before-seen works are being presented at a new exhibition in London that captures his legacy and impact.Tap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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      Magritte, Master of Surrealism, Joins the $100 Million Dollar Club

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      Move over, Picasso, Van Gogh and Warhol. With an inscrutable painting, the Belgian painter breaks the nine-figure threshold at the fall auctions.The Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte has become the latest member of that exclusive club of artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million at auction.On Tuesday night at Christie’s in Manhattan, a version of Magritte’s famously enigmatic subject, “The Empire of Light,” depicting a deserted nocturnal street below a bright daytime sky, sold for $121.2 million with fees, a record for the artist, in a packed, dark gray-painted salesroom, moodily lit in a suitably Surrealist style.Certain to sell for at least $95 million, courtesy of a guaranteed bid, the painting inspired a 10-minute duel between two telephone bidders. The price was the highest yet paid for a Surrealist work of art at auction, and made Magritte the 16th artist to break the $100 million threshold, according to data compiled by the French market analyst company Artprice.Fellow nine-figure heavyweights include Leonardo da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso (whose paintings have sold for more than $100 million at no fewer than six auctions). To date, no living artist has achieved this price level at auction.Painted in 1954 and measuring almost five-feet-high, “The Empire of Light” was the last of 19 works that Christie’s offered from the collection of the socialite, designer and philanthropist Mica Ertegun. It was one of the largest of the 17 versions of this subject that Magritte painted in oil. The best-known is probably the monumental “L’empire des lumières” in the Guggenheim Museum in Venice. Ertegun’s slightly smaller canvas, which she acquired privately in 1968, is the first in the series to include water in the foreground.“It’s maybe the best,” said Paolo Vedovi, the director of a gallery in Brussels specializing in works by Magritte and other 20th-century artists. “It seems that every big collector now wants a Magritte.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Bruce Degen, Who Drew ‘The Magic School Bus,’ Dies at 79

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      He memorably portrayed a frizzy-haired science teacher roping her elementary school class into adventures aboard a shape-shifting yellow bus.Bruce Degen, the illustrator of “The Magic School Bus” series of children’s books, died on Thursday at his home in Newtown, Conn. He was 79.The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said.The main character of the books, a science teacher named Ms. Frizzle, shows her elementary school students that adventure awaits in understanding the biology, chemistry and physics of everyday life.Ms. Frizzle drives her yellow school bus up into the clouds, so that her students can hop inside raindrops and travel through their local water treatment system. On other occasions, she drives through the small intestine and across the surface of the sun.Joanna Cole, a children’s book author, was responsible for making those lessons educational, writing the text of Ms. Frizzle’s lessons and inventing plots that put her students inside a hurricane or a classmate’s nose. Ms. Cole gave Ms. Frizzle catchphrases like “take chances, make mistakes and get messy!”Mr. Degen (pronounced like the Major Deegan Expressway) made the visual world of the books by using the clear lines of pen and ink and also the childlike softness of watercolor. He rendered Ms. Frizzle’s hair red and wildly frizzy — but contained it all in a mostly tidy bun.Mr. Degen with Joanna Cole, who wrote the text for the “Magic School Bus” books.ScholasticWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      What Trenton Doyle Hancock Learned From Philip Guston

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      The Jewish Museum pairs the Texas artist with a 20th-century master. Together they confront racism with horror — and humor.When Trenton Doyle Hancock discovered the artist Philip Guston, it was a revelation. Hancock had just transferred from junior college in his hometown, Paris, Texas, to nearby East Texas State University. He was taking a printmaking class and working with a haunting photograph he’d made of himself partially cloaked in a white sheet with a noose around his neck. The rope wound around his body, including his semi-bare right arm, which holds up a hammer. Titled “The Properties of the Hammer” (1993), it probed the dark contradictions of being a Black man in America.Hancock’s printmaking teacher, Thomas Seawell, asked if he knew about Philip Guston, the New York School artist. Guston had (very controversially) left behind Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s to make figurative, cartoonish paintings of objects like books and shoes, which hearkened back to the Holocaust, as well as hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. Seawell saw a kinship between Guston’s work and Hancock’s, but Hancock had never heard of Guston. So Seawell lent him a book, and the student fell in love.“The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible,” Hancock, 50, recalled recently. “When you put a colorful toy in front of a child, they want to eat it. That’s how I felt about those paintings: I just wanted to eat them. I didn’t even know you could make work that looked like this. It was totally new to me.”In “The Studio” (1969), Philip Guston’s hooded protagonist is an artist painting his own effigy. The artist was exploring “what would it be like to be evil?” Trenton Doyle Hancock recalled: “The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible.” The Estate of Philip Guston; via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkIf you’ve never had the urge to eat a painting, you’re not alone, but meeting Hancock or seeing his art helps make that impulse understandable. He is a voracious consumer of culture, and his work has an intense physicality — in the bodies that are forever bending, stretching and breaking in his images, and in the cutout and collaged surfaces of his paintings. Hancock’s world is a profusion of colors, of media, of characters in his ever-expanding multiverse.His studio in a Houston suburb bears this out. Rooms of the two-story house are devoted to various collections, including sketchbooks dating back to childhood, scraps and detritus (literally dirt swept off the floor of past studios), and plastic bottle caps sorted by color.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      10-Minute Challenge: Edward Hopper’s ‘Manhattan Bridge Loop’

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      Additional work by Nico Chilla and Francesca Paris. Images: Photograph of “The Architecture of a Painting” from Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.; Manhattan Bridge Loop” from Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., gift of Stephen C. Clark, Esq. / 2024 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Study for “Manhattan Bridge Loop” No. 1 from Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., gift of the artist; Study for “Manhattan Bridge Loop” No. 2 from Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., gift of the artist; “Nighthawks” from The Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection; 1919 photograph from the NYC Municipal Archives. More

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      Ford Foundation Gives $10 Million to Studio Museum in Harlem

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      The grant will support the museum’s director and chief curator, a position held for the last 20 years by Thelma Golden.The Ford Foundation has awarded the Studio Museum in Harlem a grant of $10 million to endow its director and chief curator, a position held for the last 20 years by Thelma Golden.Ford’s president, Darren Walker, announced the grant on Monday at the museum’s annual gala, which honored Golden and promoted plans for the institution’s new home in fall 2025.“The Studio Museum is the only one of New York’s great museums that does not have an endowed director position, which in my view has to be rectified,” Walker said in an interview.“Thelma has elevated this position through her unwavering commitment to excellence and that her position is not endowed is a glaring problem in my view,” Walker added. “Black and brown cultural institutions have always been under-resourced and this is another such example.”Neil Rasmus/BFAThe Ford gift also helps shore up the institution’s future, so that it is not dependent on Golden herself, who is widely considered the front-runner in the search for the next director of the Museum of Modern Art, which is currently underway.“This position naming is a testament to and acknowledgment of the six directors who came before me,” Golden said in an interview, “and also holds a real sense of possibility for the leaders who will come after.”The position will now be titled the Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator, in keeping with other major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Max Hollein is the Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer; MoMA, where Glenn D. Lowry is the David Rockefeller Director; and the Whitney Museum, where Scott Rothkopf is the Alice Pratt Brown Director.The gift has financial as well as symbolic importance, since it helps cover compensation for the position. Directors are typically well-paid to attract and retain top talent.While Walker and Golden have had a long friendship, Golden noted that Ford has supported the Studio Museum since its founding. Walker “has been an inspiration to me and my work from the beginning of my career,” she said.Walker pointed out that other museums and foundation directors have close personal ties and that his friendship with Golden should not disadvantage the Studio Museum.“At the Ford Foundation we invest in excellence, and by any objective standard the Studio Museum punches above its weight and is worthy of this kind of gift,” Walker said. “It has earned the right to have an endowed directorship.” More

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      South Korea’s Modern Dance Scene is Thriving

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      Thanks to government support — and a collaborative spirit among dance companies — the medium is thriving across the country.While the high-octane choreography in K-pop videos has helped define South Korea’s image globally, in the country itself, it’s modern dance that’s in the spotlight. It is a huge part of the country’s arts scene, quietly flourishing and influencing new generations of dancers and choreographers.Its popularity and reach are evident throughout the country, especially among the dozens of companies, in Seoul and other cities, that share dancers, choreographers and designers. And several of those companies are making a name for themselves internationally, performing abroad and inviting major names to choreograph in South Korea.This year’s Seoul International Dance Festival in September was a testament to the country’s dominance in the medium, with companies from Canada, Australia, Europe and, of course, Korea performing over two weeks. And several performances coming up later this fall display the country’s growing visibility on the global dance stage.Some dancers from the Korean National Contemporary Dance Company, which bills itself as the only government-funded national contemporary dance company in Asia, are to perform “Shut Up Womb” (Nov. 15-17), a revival of the 2021 dance by the Japanese choreographer Shimojima Reisa, at the Seoul Arts Center right around the same time some of the company’s other dancers are to perform “Jungle” in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 16-20, as part of a program celebrating South Korean culture.“Jungle” debuted in October 2023 in Seoul, and then traveled to Austria, France, Italy and Kazakhstan this summer. It will return to South Korea in November 2025 in a program that will also include “One Flat Thing, reproduced,” a dance by the celebrated American choreographer William Forsythe.For Kim Sungyong, the new artistic director of the company, this international touring speaks to the success of dance in his home country, and to the access to a variety of well-trained dancers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Artist Sues Town for Canceling Residency Over Her Views on Gaza War

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      The American Civil Liberties Union has sued Vail, Colo., on behalf of a Native American artist who painted a work entitled “G is for Genocide.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the town of Vail on behalf of a Native American artist, claiming it violated her First Amendment rights when it abruptly canceled an artist residency she had been offered after she posted to social media a painting about her views on the war in Gaza.The painting depicted a woman wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh and a feather, and it was entitled “G is for Genocide.” In March, the artist, Danielle SeeWalker, shared a photo of it on Instagram with the caption, “Some days, I have overwhelming grief + guilt for walking around privileged while people in Gaza are suffering for no reason.”Two month later, town officials told SeeWalker, 41, that her residency through Vail’s Art in Public Places program, which was scheduled to last 10 days in June while she completed a mural in the town, had been terminated because the painting had angered some in the local Jewish community, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court last week.The fallout from SeeWalker’s painting is the latest in a string of incidents involving criticism of Israel that have roiled the art world, raising questions over freedom of speech among artists, writers, museum employees, actors and others who oppose Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.The war started with Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people. Since then, Israeli military operations have killed more than 42,000 people in Gaza, many of them women and children, local health authorities say. Israel vehemently denies that its military has targeted civilians and claims Hamas fighters purposely hide among noncombatants.A spokeswoman for Vail, a town more than 90 miles west of Denver best known for its ski resorts, declined to comment about the lawsuit on Tuesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More