8 artworks that made us question the value of art

CNN — When Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall and priced it at $120,000, he sparked an age-old debate about what constitutes art. Yoko Ono’s “Apple” Dave M. Benett/Getty Images More than five decades before Maurizio Cattelan started taping bananas to walls, Japanese artist Yoko Ono exhibited an apple on an acrylic glass pedestal. In response to the request, Robert Rauschenberg – a powerful force in American art history who spent his time as a painter, performer, designer, sculptor and printmaker, among other things – playfully sent a telegram, which read: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert If I say so – Robert Rauschenberg.” The work, rooted in Neo-Dadaism and absurdist humor, defied all conventions of portraiture for a start, and offered layers of interpretation as the artist didn’t definitively “say so” and expressed himself as “I,” which the reader could also interpret as themselves. Nat Tate’s “Bridge No 114” Nat Tate/Sotheby's This painting, sold at auction by Sotheby’s in 2011 for £7,250, was one of only 18 surviving works by Nat Tate, an artist who had tragically committed suicide in 1960 – or at least the story goes, because he wasn’t, in fact, real. Nat Tate – a name crafted from National Gallery and Tate Gallery, two major London museums – was a fictional character created by British novelist and screenwriter William Boyd in 1998, when he published “Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960.” To go along with the detailed background story of the fictional artist, Boyd also created a handful of paintings, and one of them sold easily at auction, beating its upper estimate by over 50%.