Our First Weeks Back
The past two weeks, I’ve had a couple of moments in class that really stuck with me, both circling around the idea of value in art. What makes something “worth” a million dollars, and what makes an idea “worth” exploring.
It started with the banana.
I’ve got some old glitter art pieces sitting out on the couch, and one of them is my glitter version of the famous banana duct-taped to a wall. A few of the kids spotted it and immediately went, “Wait, isn’t that the banana that sold for a million dollars?” And yes, it’s that one, back in the news recently because it sold again.
Their first reaction was exactly what you’d expect: “That’s ridiculous. I could do that.” Which, of course, opened the door for one of my favorite conversations. Why can’t they? Why can’t any of us? The short version is: because the idea has already been done. Because it wasn’t just about a banana, it was about decades of career-building, connections, and timing. And because the art world doesn’t run on flat rules, it runs on context.
We talked about how the Mona Lisa can’t be priced, but my paintings can. How my work sells differently in Brookhaven than it would in New Orleans or New York. And how their work, right now, sells for different numbers still. Not because it isn’t good, but because experience, audience, and history matter. You can’t compare your work directly to someone else’s path. Everyone’s journey looks different.
And then the same idea came up again in a totally different way.
The older kids have been working on reimagined masterpieces. They had to pick a famous painting and come up with a parody or derivative version. But instead of generating lots of ideas, most of them skipped the brainstorming step and went straight to thumbnail sketches. And what happened? Almost all of them landed on the same painting, Magritte’s Son of Man (the bowler hat guy with the apple), and almost all of them just… changed the fruit.
It was a perfect real-time example of why you can’t stop at your first idea. The first idea is almost always the most obvious, the one everyone else will think of too. Real originality comes when you push past that, when you keep writing, keep sketching, keep digging until something new shows up.
So whether it’s a banana taped to a wall or an apple swapped for an orange, the lesson is the same: art isn’t about the quick idea. It’s about the context you build around it, and the willingness to go further than what comes first to mind.
