Trevor Laffan: Call me old-fashioned, but a lot of modern art is bananas to me

I admit to being completely clueless when it comes to art, but I’m not the only one.

Call me old fashioned, but when I see a fuss being made of a banana taped to a wall and art-lovers getting their knickers in a twist about it, I get a tad cynical. And that actually happened.

A banana which was duct-taped to a wall sold for $5.2 million in the United States last year which, after auction fees, brought the final price to $6.2 million.

The banana was promptly eaten by the buyer, Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun. What he had actually purchased was a certificate of authenticity that gave him the authority to duct-tape a banana to a wall and call it ‘Comedian’ which is the official name of the piece.

If that makes sense to you, then you’re a wiser person than me.

There was another art story about a €50m Mark Rothko painting that was damaged at a museum in Rotterdam. A child somehow managed to get close enough to the painting to scratch it, and as a result, it will have to undergo restoration work to return it to its natural glory.

“Conservation expertise has been sought in the Netherlands and abroad. We are currently researching the next steps for the treatment of the painting,” the museum spokesperson told the BBC.

“We expect that the work will be able to be shown again in the future.”

The conservation manager at the Fine Art Restoration Company said that “modern, unvarnished” paintings like Rothko’s Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8 are “particularly susceptible to damage.”

When I saw the artwork, it made me wonder how it could be valued at €50m.

To my untrained eye, I would describe it as a grey square background, with a rectangle of darker grey roughly painted on the upper half of the square, and a smaller orange rectangle painted underneath.

The painting is titled Grey, Orange on Maroon No.8 but it looks more like a redacted document from the Pentagon than a piece of art.

There is now a question of how much the restoration will cost, and who will pay for it.

While the museum does not want to make any statements about the bill, it will surely be a nice pay day for an art restorer. However, I reckon I could save the museum a fortune if they would let me at it.

Give me a two-inch brush and a couple of sample tins of paint and I’d have it whipped into shape in no time.

We’d even have time to pop across the road for a couple of pints after.

Another Rothko artwork is a yellow square with a red rectangle halfway down and another rectangle roughly painted underneath that again.

There’s no ruler used in these things, they’re all done freehand, and, in all honesty, to my admittedly untrained eye, I can’t see where the skill comes into it.

One critic is adamant that only Rothko could paint these and describes how colours in his work bleed at the boundary, collapse at the crease, and dissolve like a desert mirage. A corner that looks crisp at a distance, curls on inspection. The edges are soft, scumbled and smoky.

The issue here is, how can I learn to appreciate Mr Rothko’s work, when I can’t even understand the description of it?

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder though, and if people get a kick out of looking at pieces of art like that, who am I to criticise?

As a teenager, I visited the Louvre in Paris which, according to Britannica, is the national museum and art gallery of France, housed in part of a large palace that was built on the right-bank site of the 12th-century fortress of Philip Augustus.

It is the world’s most-visited art museum, with a collection that spans work from ancient civilisations to the mid-19th century.

The Louvre is a beautiful building full of artwork that enthusiasts drool over in their thousands every week. Any painter worth their salt has their work displayed there, but the beauty was largely wasted on me. I just couldn’t see it.

The only painting I can remember seeing was the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1500s, and that only interested me because of how famous it was. As a picture, it was nice, but it didn’t strike me as being anything special - then again, what do I know?

I have a picture hanging in my sitting room measuring 23 inches by 33 inches. It’s a photograph of a cruise liner passing the promenade in Cobh on the way to the quayside. The photo was taken by Colm McDonagh, a local photographer.

It was taken early in the morning, when the sea was calm, and it looks like it has the makings of a nice day. The liner is barely moving as it prepares to dock at the quayside and the whole scene looks very tranquil.

It’s a photograph and not a painting, I know, but it depicts something real.

It’s not about a piece of fruit or random shapes and colours, it’s an actual ship, on real water, passing a place I’m very familiar with, and it gives me endless pleasure. It didn’t break the bank either

I couldn’t get that from a banana.