Birkin Bag IS ‘Banana Duct-Taped to a Wall’.
Because We’ll Buy Just About Anything…
Everybody likes to assume that promotion for capitalist rhetoric will come in the form of incredibly obvious; plasticky billboards that give of some kind of dystopian feel, executed by painfully white, somewhat uncanny smiles. But like always, we overestimate our ability to remain vigilant. For this reason, it feels like we’re still always waiting for dystopia to arrive. But of course waiting for dystopia is essentially pointless because right now, that so-called dystopia is so interwoven into our society because it lives within us, and more importantly our habits. Dystopia is not some far removed, far away concept that we can identify but somehow remain completely unadulterated by it. I find that our consumerist habits are the best embodiment of this truth. When sit on the internet and even entertain the idea that the most expensive Birkin Bag is worth even close to $2 million, we represent the dystopia we’re always so keen on discussing. Perhaps it’s an all too intentional design, where movies specifically have managed to attribute labels that speak to the future for having everything to do with robots and flying cars and nothing to do with our insane spending habits, and continued, most devoted worship of wealth or at least the idea of it. But in the effort to buy the idea, we grossly overconsume, and as a necessary byproduct, waste at an alarming rate.
Have we become to accustomed to the idea of waste that we fetishize it now?
Will ‘Banana duct taped to a wall’ tell future historians all they need to know about the people who lived around now, or reveal how much we’re willing to throw cash away for the sake of it?
($6.2 million in cash to be exact), ever since Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased the piece at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction, as apart of Maurizio Cattelan's 2019 conceptual artwork Comedian, which is intended to be duct-taped to a wall, with instructions to replace the fruit when it rots. I can’t help but applaud the artist, because in an irony reserved for social experiments, he outdid himself in proving one thesis, that people will buy just about anything, assuming this was the intention.
What I will say, is that it’s indisputably clear that the sale of Comedian highlighted a shift in art buying trends, with arts’ commodification and the blurring lines between cultural phenomena and market speculation. For big players in the crypto-sphere, the recent obsession with purchasing expensive art buys them introduction into spaces traditionally reserved for old money, and so just as the banana satirises the concept of ‘intricate and authentic’ art only having value, and so inserts itself into a space it typically shouldn’t belong in, so-called ‘new money’ manages to insert itself into spaces where ‘old-money’ traditionally finds himself and messes things up a bit whilst he's there. Instead of shifting the focus to a piece of art having taken considerably more skill to execute, we remain fixated on banana taped to a wall and have been since 2019 for various reasons, and despite any kind of deeper significance displayed by the piece regarding market trends or the satirizing of a certain snobbery within creative spaces, most of us still circle round to the overarching point, that people will buy just about anything, and laugh at those like Sun in an air of superiority, whilst ironically, engaging in discourse about the importance of the Birkin Bag in 2024.
Worse still, are the very small percentage of those who will laugh at ‘Banana duct taped to a wall’, but will at some point in their lives scrimp and save in hopes that they might one day buy or better yet afford one of those bags, (the ultimate symbol of exclusivity and wealth). In an effort to buy the idea of prestige and separatism that is typically only afforded to the very richest of us, those in adoration of the Birkin will revere it as if it were a glorious piece of intricately made artwork, the kind only auctioned off within close circles of ‘old-money’ and passed down through generations as some kind of ‘investment piece’, or something. But in mistaking the bag for something more than what it actually is and was initially intended for, it’s identity is transformed into something else entirely, and it becomes more symbolic of that plasticky dystopia to perfectly match it’s plasticky fabric.
It becomes more… ‘Banana duct taped to a wall’.
And out pour images of Jane Birkin, the very muse for this piece, whose ‘vibe’ couldn’t have been more different than the feel and look of Birkin’s tucked behind glass cabinets now. The functionality of the bag has essentially been lost, and I’m not even sure people use the bag to hold things in anymore, not every day at least. To me, part of the joy that comes with buying higher quality items comes in knowing that I’ll get my wear out of it, which does in a sense justify the price tag. But how many times could you wear a bag that on av. costs tens of thousands of dollars before it begins to feel worth it? It’s likely that no amount of usage would suffice, and so it’s possible the bag is worth infinitely more for what it tells us about our society than it is as a wearable item.
So, when the Walmart Birkin showed up all over my ‘For You’ page, it was a curious thing to watch people on either sides. On one side of the conversation, you have the Walmart Birkin buyers, (those who fell on either end of the wealth spectrum by the way), who appeared as being infinitely more secure in their station than those on the other side of the conversation, who took up arms to carefully (yet somehow aggressively) propose principles of delayed gratification and the joys that came with ‘buying the real thing’ like these were entirely new concepts.
I don’t think I’m naïve enough to mistake ‘Walmart Birkin’, a product of a multi-billion dollar corporation, for being the radical antithesis of the real Birkin, a different product of another multi-billion dollar corporation in any way. There is nothing particularly revolutionary about buying a fake Birkin bag, just as there is nothing particularly impressive about buying a real one. But I will say that what I enjoy about the fake Birkin is the willingness to give up pretence here. Unlike fakes that came before it, people aren’t walking around with Walmart Birkin pretending it’s the real thing. Walmart Birkin buyers are part of an emerging trend to put the function back into fashion, which is one of the only trends to have good faith in I suppose. Of course, fashion is necessarily a part of art and visa versa for obvious and exciting reasons, but where the Birkin is rarely admired for it’s immense beauty, and has actually been deemed fairly ugly by an overwhelmingly loud group of people (myself included), why not create one cheap enough for people to comfortably wear down?
Unfortunately, there will always be those who look at the Hermes Birkin and see ‘Starry Night’ or ‘No Woman, No Cry’, who despite criticisms, believe they’re in possession of something truly special, whilst holding in their hands a piece of rotting fruit.
But between real Birkin, or ‘Banana Duct-Taped to a Wall’, we know now that the exclusive and the ridiculously absurd exist not as a contrast, but as mere reflections of one another.
In 100 years’ time, historians will recall The Modern Era, where the ‘lower classes’ were repeatedly tricked into buying ideas rather than things, and Birkin and Banana will sit side by side in the museum.
Asisa