8 Times Art Went Viral in 2024

What a year. In the United States, 2024’s news cycle was dominated by a dramatic and unpredictable presidential election. Around the world, uncertainty prevailed as over 60 other countries held national elections with the power to shift the government in an instant.

Amid a deafening barrage of political updates, art news occasionally managed to cut through. One minute, everyone was lamenting the state of the art market. The next, a banana sold at auction for $6.2 million. Over the course of nine days, animal-themed Banksy murals sprung up across London. A specific shade of green became a cultural touchstone.

The writer, curator, and art historian Matthew Israel—whose 2021 book A Year in The Art World examined the contemporary art industry—applies the lens of art history to these viral moments. He sees them in continuity with, and not as rupture from, the past: “This list…indicates the cyclical nature of the art world,” he told Artsy, noting how this year’s trending art stories relate to “much more long-standing artistic strategies that continue to resonate.”

Only time will tell which of these moments make the history books. But Tim Schneider, founder of art business digest The Gray Market, offered a guess: “Comedian and ‘Brat green’ have had unusual longevity because they’ve inspired as much negativity as positivity, if not even more of the former, from audiences around the world,” he said in an interview. “Conflict makes these touchpoints stickier than consensus.”

Below, we’ve taken a look back at the times that art went viral in 2024.

The opening ceremony at the Olympics caused an art historical stir

An unusual complaint dogged Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris: One of his performances too closely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic painting The Last Supper (1495–98).

For the opening ceremony event, a group of drag queens appeared flanking a raised red carpet that served as a catwalk—but also suggested a long banquet table. In the middle of the group, one performer wore a blue gown and a silver, halo-like headdress. Later, a nearly nude man, painted blue and intended to resemble the Greek god Dionysus, appeared at the center of the catwalk on a giant, colorful platter.

In Leonardo’s masterpiece, Jesus is also seated at the center of the table and wears blue. Some observers, picking up on this visual echo, argued that Jolly was making fun of Christianity by riffing on a famous depiction of Jesus and his followers. Amid the ensuing backlash, a spokesperson for the Olympics apologized—but Jolly denied that Leonardo’s scene inspired the work. Meanwhile, art historians suggested that the true inspiration for the vignette was Jan van Bijlert’s The Feast of the Gods (1635–40).

Reddit sleuths developed another theory. “It’s mostly a stupid fucking pun,” wrote one user. “‘La Cène’ (the last supper), ‘La scène’ (the stage) and ‘La Seine’ (the river that goes through Paris) are all pronounced the exact same way in French. So this was ‘La Cène sur une scène sur la Seine’ (The Last Supper on a stage on the Seine).”

Banksy unleashed a menagerie in London

In August, Banksy produced nine new murals in London over the course of nine days. A goat appeared first, on a white wall near Kew Bridge in Richmond. The next work, in Chelsea, featured two elephants reaching their trunks towards each other. Three monkeys followed, then a lone, howling wolf. Thieves stole the latter work, which adorned a satellite dish in Peckham, less than an hour after it was unveiled.

Banksy was undeterred. Pelicans emerged atop signage for a fish and chips shop in Walthamstow, and a panther stretched across a wooden billboard in Cricklewood. Piranhas swam across a police sentry box in Ludgate Hill, and a rhino appeared to mount a Nissan in Charlton. Finally, Banksy tagged the London Zoo gate to look as though a gorilla was jailbreaking the animals inside. Londoners, and the media at large, eagerly noted each new work.

The “Ladies Lounge” fought to stay man-free

A complicated legal saga brought attention to Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) this year. Back in 2020, curator and artist Kirsha Kaechele created an ongoing exhibition called “Ladies Lounge”—a lavish, women-only gallery space that showed, apparently, famous artworks from the museum collection and the personal holdings of Kaechele’s own family. Israel, the art historian, noted how the work connects to a larger lineage of feminist art installations, such as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79), which similarly called attention to gender disparity “through the establishment of physical space.”

This March, a complaint from non-lady visitor Jason Lau was reviewed by Tasmania’s anti-discrimination commissioner. A tribunal ruled in his favor, and Kaechele responded by moving the artworks from the “Ladies Lounge” into the women’s bathroom. MONA then mounted an appeal in the state’s Supreme Court and won, after justices ruled that the original “Ladies Lounge” actually “promoted equal opportunity” by rectifying ongoing disadvantages for a marginalized group. In mid-December, “Ladies Lounge”reopened to the public.

The saga has yet another twist: In July, Kaechele shared that she had forged the Picassos in the lounge and invented elaborate backstories for the otherwise unfancy artifacts that rounded out the presentation. Fake art, discrimination cases, a decked-out women’s bathroom—this news story truly had it all.

“Brat green” became “so Julia”

Charli XCX called it: “I set the tone, it’s my design / And it’s stuck in your mind.” When the singer released her album Brat in June, the songs became ubiquitous, as did the slime green hue on its cover. Throughout the summer, brands and individuals co-opted the color for their own marketing purposes. A turning point arrived in late July, when Charli tweeted “kamala IS brat,” and the Kamala Harris campaign rebranded its social media presence accordingly.

Schneider, of The Gray Market, predicts that “Brat green” will make the history books. It “might have been forgotten in a few years if not for its entanglement in the already-infamous 2024 U.S. presidential election,” he said. At the very least, it had a bigger impact on visual culture in 2024 than “Peach Fuzz,” Pantone’s pick for the color of the year.

King Charles’s portrait made critics see red

Jonathan Yeo’s stunningly strange painting of King Charles III went viral in May. The first official, post-coronation portrait features the king’s face emerging from a red haze, while a butterfly flits above his right shoulder.

The artist claimed he was attempting something new, but critics weren’t on board with the experiment. TheWashington Post called the work “a stylistic mess.” At The Guardian, Jonathan Jones gave the portrait one out of five stars and lamented the fact that he actually liked Yeo as a person. Even fashion writers from The New York Times and The Cut jumped in to pan the work. The internet united, for once, in passionate disparagement.

Israel took the long view. He noted that this was far from the first controversy surrounding an official portrait of a leader. In 1954, for example, Graham Sutherland created a portrait of Winston Churchill which the prime minister hated so much, he had it destroyed. King Charles, in contrast, seems pleased with the Yeo work.

In Newsweek, the artist argued that in person, at larger scale, the artwork is more subtle. Most of us will never know.

A Queen Elizabeth tribute mis(doubt)fired

Yeo’s was not the only royal portrait to cause a stir this year. In September, Northern Ireland’s Antrim Castle Gardens unveiled Anto Brennan’s bronze sculpture of Queen Elizabeth II, and the internet hordes did not approve. The work featured the monarch standing in a headscarf and checkered coat, hands clasped primly in front of her. Naysayers complained the bronze work looked nothing like the former queen—and, in fact, more greatly resembled Robin Williams’s character from the 1993 film Mrs. Doubtfire. Some even called for its destruction. Yet the sculpture, which stands next to a bronze Prince Phillip and two bronze corgis, will remain.

“Is this the worst tribute so far to Queen Elizabeth II?” The Spectator asked. Yet it, along with other outlets, published an image of the artist and his work and brought new awareness to the town council, which put out a statement. The council welcomed the attention and noted: “While social media may amplify certain negative viewpoints, the council encourages everyone to visit Antrim Castle Gardens and experience the sculpture firsthand.”

A crypto billionaire had his banana—and ate it too

Of all the moments on this list, Sotheby’s November sale of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) for $6.2 million (with fees) is the most likely to persist in cultural memory. The editioned work, which consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall, debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, where it sold for a comparatively meager $120,000–$150,000.

This time around, the piece sold to Justin Sun, a Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur who promised to eat the banana after his purchase. Generating even more attention for the sale, Sotheby’s executive Michael Bouhanna created a meme coin of the work before it went to auction. Two of the bidders, who ultimately lost to Sun, also invested in the cryptocurrency. The sale became an emblem of the art market’s volatility, the place of cryptocurrency within the contemporary art world, and—once it was discovered that the banana was purchased for $0.35 from a Manhattan fruit stand—wealth disparity in New York City and beyond.

Israel, who put an image of Comedian on the cover of his book A Year in the Art World, is interested in the work beyond its market value. “It’s a pretty complex package…a banana stuck to a wall has great shock value and wall power,” he said. “It connects to so many facets of art history and broader cultural history.” Hardly a simple gag, the banana evokes readymades by Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni, vaudeville comedy featuring the banana slip, the U.S. history of colonization and trade, and more.

A giant pigeon landed on New York’s High Line