In Defense of a Banana

Surely, there is nothing more infuriating than sitting idly by while the wealthiest among us treat the planet as a disposable playground. Art is one of humanity’s great victims of commodification and status-linked objectification; it is also no secret that the rich use works of art to shuffle money around, treating them as investment properties rather than revered with the sacredness that artists themselves apply to their work. But do the actions of wealthy collectors factor into the context of the works of art themselves? With over a century of art within the genre to examine, there is an argument to be made that Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian exists in a long lineage of conceptual art, regardless of whether or not the work sells to a crypto billionaire. If Comedian is just a “banana and a roll of tape,” then what can we say about the dematerialization movement of the 1960s and beyond? If we can reduce an artwork to being merely the sum of its parts rather than a work worthy of consideration in the canon, then what can we say about any art at all?

First, perhaps we should begin by understanding the idea of the readymade and its origins. Not all of my readers will be familiar with this term; to define it, a “readymade” (often used interchangeably with the term “found object”) is a work of art composed of recognizable—and often commercial—objects that may or may not have been modified, but have been presented in such a way that they are elevated to the status of “art object.” The elevation of these objects is largely a conceptual and contextual elevation; the artist has placed the objects in a gallery or museum setting, or the artist has declared the work a work of art by virtue of simply being put together by an artist. As conceptual artist Bruce Nauman once put it:

“If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.” 

Both of these contextual applications to readymades have a long history in the history of art. When the father of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp, famously submitted his (still-controversial) work Fountain for exhibition with the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, his explanation was that this item—a urinal turned on its side and signed with a pseudonym—was elevated to the status of art due to the interventions of the artist. At the same time, it was the placement of this work in the exhibition (and its ensuing publication in The Blind Man, a Dadaist publication documenting the visual art and writings of experimental artists) that elevated its status from “object” to “art object” for the viewing public; the piece became accessible as art in part due to is validation as a work of art by virtue of existing in art spaces.

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp

But is it art? Well, if an object—created or altered by an artist and placed into an art setting— is not art, then what is?

The idea that we can define what art is, and dictate what it is not, is a long outdated one. This shift can be contributed, in the Western canon of visual art, in part to the advent of Modernism, and eventually (and perhaps more consequentially), Postmodernism. This approach to thinking about visual art predates even Modernism, though. Prominent at the start of the 20th century, Modernism was the ideological daughter of Impressionism and Expressionism, art movements that reflected the changing social mores of their times and which rejected the traditional aesthetics of visual art. Impressionists and Expressionists both largely focused on traditional subject matter, but rendered them in radical ways: Impressionists focused on embracing the aesthetic values that promoted a truer sensation of experiencing the subject matter firsthand (giving the impression of the subject), while Expressionists largely rejected the aesthetic values of the subject matter entirely, choosing instead to render their works in ways that spoke more to the artists’ feelings about the subject matter than about the subject matter itself (expressing themselves over expressing the object). Both of these movements, now perhaps considered by some to be dated or even blasé, were considered avant-garde at the time of their practices, and artists working in these modes initially faced criticism and rejection by institutions in the arts. To the viewer only familiar with immaculately rendered traditional portraiture, John Singer Sargent’s 1903 painting Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel could have been seen as a masterpiece. That same viewer, in that same year, likely would have felt repulsion at the painful display in Käthe Kollwitz’s Woman With Dead Child—and that repulsion, in many ways, was the point. 

Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel by John Singer Sargent

Woman with Dead Child by Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz’s expressive depiction of a mother and her dead child should repulse us, it should bring us pain; it is a cry towards our humanity, rendered in such a way that the pain inherent to the subject matter is apparent simply in the rough lines that make up the composition. Is Woman With Dead Child any less of a work of art because of its rejection of the formal elements present in John Singer Sargent’s portrait? Is it less of a work of art because it does not embody traditional beauty? 

From Modernism came a multitude of new genres of art, each experimenting with abstraction and the destruction of the convenient formalism that allowed viewers to feel comfortable enjoying art for the sake of its beauty. I use these words here—”convenient” and “comfortable”—purposefully; we, as humans, prefer predictability. We prefer to be able to understand things on our own terms. We have a pathological need, as a species, for the world around us to make sense; when we are met with something unfamiliar, it poses an intellectual challenge to us, and when we cannot rise to meet that intellectual challenge, it is much easier for us to deny the validity of the unfamiliar thing rather than attempt to expand our understanding capabilities. This is the case when you hear the remark “a child could make that” about works by Joan Miró, or Helen Frankenthaler, or Cy Twombly. Even if a child could make their works, is a child not capable of art? 

Untitled (Bacchus) by Cy Twombly

With each new genre—Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Performance Art, Fluxus, Dematerialism, et al—art that rejected formalism was met, again and again and across the globe, with resistance. The Conceptual Art movement, originating with the aforementioned Duchamp work Fountain, embraced a rejection of formalism to its most radical degree by emphasizing the idea and intention of a work over its physical properties. This paved the way for the Dematerialization movement of the 1960s, famously documented by Lucy Lippard, whose documentation efforts are in many cases the only documentation or evidence of the works of art included in this movement. The Dematerialization movement focused on pushing the boundaries of conceptual art by reducing, or totally removing, the physical components of a work of art; the artist only used materials that were necessary to convey the idea at hand. Much of the art contained in this genre did not resemble “art” at all; famous examples of these works include Lawrence Weiner’s word art, or On Kawara’s I Got Up series of postcards. Face to face with these works, they would each be hard to parse as art if you were only familiar with formalist approaches to art. Weiner considered language to be his artistic medium, meaning that the content of his works often consisted of text placed on walls in ways that lead to the destruction of the physical piece with removal or deinstallation. On Kawara’s postcards are exhibited internationally; yet, if we consider only the objects themselves, they are ordinary postcards written in the morning when Kawara rose from his bed. Much of the art in this movement was made using cheap, non-art materials—if any materials were used at all.

OVER AND OVER. OVER AND OVER. AND OVER AND OVER. AND OVER AND OVER. by Lawrence Weiner

Now, back to the banana at hand. Comedian, an installation piece made up of a banana duct taped to the wall, was first displayed at Art Basel Miami in 2019, where two editions of it sold for over $100,000 each. Given what we have already established with regards to the importance of context in the determination of a work of art’s legitimacy, and given what we have established with regards to the history of common objects (or a lack of objects) as art, this should be the end of the argument. An artist conceived of an installation piece and installed said piece in an art space. However, despite Comedian’s maker, despite its location of display, despite the notoriety and massive amount of attention it received globally, and despite its success with regards to being sold as a work of art, the piece is met with unending resistance and denial—even from experts writing in the field of visual art. This refusal to accept the work as legitimate seems to stem partly from a refusal of the object itself as an art object, and partly from a general distaste for the rich and the ways in which they spend their money; however, does the price tag of an artwork affect whether or not that object is art? Would these same critics argue that Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450 million, is no longer a work of art because of its cost? Or would its formal qualities protect it from this critique? In 2017 when Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled sold for $110 million, did these critics dare claim that the painting was not art, that Jean-Michel Basquiat was not an artist? Perhaps then, in their minds, the deciding factor is simply whether or not the artist is still living—but then, what can we say about the painting Flag (by the still-living Jasper Johns) which sold for $110 million in 2010? Perhaps, in the mind of these critics, a work of art must be a painting to qualify as art at all.

Untitled by Jean-Michel Basquiat

To reduce an artwork to the sum of its parts is, to state it plainly, a foolish and shameful approach to considering art. One would not refer to a painting as being simply “paint and a canvas,” and to reduce a work of conceptual art such as Comedian to “a banana and a roll of tape” is to reinforce oppressive hierarchical structures and deny social progress within the arts. Thomas Adorno wrote about this very subject in the 1950s and 1960s, stating in his work Aesthetic Theory that art is not only a social fact due to its mode of production, but also due to its propensity to oppose the society from which it emerges. Conceptual art has always been a political movement—see Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll, or Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, or My Bed by Tracey Emin, or John Cage’s 4’33”, or Grapefruit by Yoko Ono, or literally any other piece of conceptual art—and as a movement it is inherently defined by its rejection of the tradition of art being economically accessible. Maurizio Cattelan is no stranger to economic issues; one of his most famous works, L.O.V.E., is a sculpture permanently installed in Milan of a massive hand giving a middle finger to the Italian stock exchange, which it prominently sits in front of. Cattelan is certainly aware of his own fame, and certainly aware that fame brings with it the privilege of having a high price tag when your name is attached to a work of art—even if that work of art is, effectively, garbage. Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt said in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art that “In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work,” and that “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” It is estimated that Maurizio Cattelan paid less than a dollar to create Comedian, a piece of art that ultimately rots away within days of its creation; on November 20, 2024, Comedian sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $5.2 million dollars. If you cannot see the irony, humor, and artistic value inherent to the piece, then it is not buyer who missed the point—it’s you.

L.O.V.E. by Maurizio Cattelan

Chickenshit

This story was written in February and March of 2023. I hope you enjoy.

My father calls you chickenshit. 

“You are so cute; you look like a little baby,” the nurse says to me, gently ripping a needle through the thin skin at the crease of my elbow—I cannot watch because it makes me feel woozy, but then I feel the blood escape my arm and I get woozy anyway—you really think I could do this to myself?

I wait a day to see a doctor. I wait two days to see a doctor. I wait three days and on the third day a quiet bear of a man takes me into his office and asks me to sit six feet away.”For safety,” he says. “Lithium,” he says. “Your parents were alcoholics,” he says, “and that comes with some baggage.” He sighs. “Yes, lithium, yes, yes. It is natural,” he says, “it’s on the periodic table of elements.” I imagine him prescribing me helium next. I imagine myself floating away. I am overwhelmed with joy.

The hospital spans a city block and I am in room A235 which sits at the intersection of California and Winona, which means I can take the bus south and then east to my house or west to “this is too much,” which I understand to mean “you are too much,” which, for the record, is right on the money. And I can’t take the bus, after all. Not yet.

“You have a phone call,” I hear at nine a.m. “You have a phone call,” I hear at ten. “You have a phone call,” I hear at lunch time. It is my father every time, persistent, convinced that his calls are keeping me alive (and, in a way, they are). He tells me “you are loved,” he tells me “you are missed,” he asks me “do you need me to come visit?” And I say “No, no, no.” Sometimes when the phone rings it is a friend instead; “how’s it going?” they all say before catching themselves with embarrassment, only realizing what they’ve asked after I laugh at the question. How’s it going, indeed. Ha, ha, ha.

For my job I work with hospitals, helping them find and purchase art—the really boring shit you see in hallways and waiting rooms. Landscapes, rivers, fields of flowers, waterfalls, realistic, traditional. “Please, please,” screams a woman down the hallway. I stare at a painting of magnolias. “It hurts, please!” The painter’s technique is terrible. 

By the end of the third day I am exhausted with the entire routine: wake up, vitals, “do you have thoughts of hurting yourself?” breakfast, TV time (cop show 1, cop show 2, Family Guy, cop show 3), the screaming, a phone call, lunch, vitals, “do you have any thoughts of hurting anyone else?” tv time (Discovery network, the Fast and the Furious movies on TNT, Family Guy, cop show 4), the crying, quiet time, nap, phone call, dinner, vitals, “do you have any thoughts at all?” TV time (this time a movie—Save the Last Dance, followed by Family Guy) the screaming and crying, a phone call, quiet time, sleep. I am the most rested I have ever been, and I am exhausted.

On the fourth day I wake up crying and the nurses bring me my favorite breakfast: french toast and scrambled eggs. The lump in my throat makes eating too difficult and I leave the plate untouched. I cry harder; another failure I could notch on my belt (if I were allowed to have one). I am afraid that my crying will keep me here longer, despite this being the perfect time and place to cry. I want to lie in bed and cry and sleep all day long and I think of how much you would hate that. I imagine myself with a big red stamp across my forehead that says “PROBLEM” and I crave desperately to be solved. My nurse tells me how very lucky I am to be allowed to use a pencil. “It’s usually only crayons,” she tells me through a smile she must reserve for children, the elderly, the ill, the most pitiful among us. “It’s usually just crayons.”

Later on the fourth day my father, fifteen hours away, arranges the delivery of a blanket and six pairs of fresh underwear. The blanket is small, but soft and pink, and I wrap myself in it tight like a child. The thought occurs to me that my father may be the only man who will ever love me. I slam the door of my mind on the sentiment—perhaps I will someday have to accept this, but for now I grab a copy of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe that I checked out from the psych ward library (which is just a single bookshelf in a locked closet) and I scrawl inside the front cover “we must believe this place is a doorway.”

On the night of the second day, a phone call: what little of me is left, you kill. I hang the phone up and collapse, crumpling to the floor like a paper cup. At least one of us gets the job done.

On the fifth day I wake up because the woman down the hallway is screaming again and it fills me with rage so hot that I must take my shirt off just to breathe. I hate her, I hate her so, so much. Then I realize that everyone else hates her, too—perhaps that is why she screams. I am wrought with guilt. I begin to sob. When the crying breaks I daydream about vengeance: waiting until the screaming woman is sleeping, then bursting into her room wearing a mask and screaming “ooga booga booga!” to terrorize her awake, the way she has done the rest of us, holding our fragile psyches hostage. I will not do it, of course, but the thought alone makes me laugh so hard I feel feral. When the nurse comes to take my vitals, a single tear betrays me. “Did I make you cry?” she asks. I tell her no, though I’m not entirely sure. “Life is like the sharpening of a knife,” she says to me. “Every challenge makes you sharper.”

That morning I request the chaplain and in the afternoon a short, stout, busy woman comes barrelling into our hospital wing. “Where is 235?” she asks, leaving out pleasantries or introduction. I raise my hand slowly then lead her to my room. When I called for the chaplain I expected gentleness, patience, a glimmer of empathy—this woman is less one of God’s messengers and more one of His bureaucrats. She serves me question after question: are they medicating you? How long have you been here? What do you want from me? I tell her “I am lost,” to which she responds “Therapy helps.” She says a quick prayer for my doctors to figure out my medication, then leaves faster than she arrived. I sit in shock for a few moments before it occurs to me that God must be regular therapy and a precise pharmaceutical regimen. I pray to Lithium, to Abilify, to Wellbutrin, and I slump down in my bed. From my window I see light dance off the stained glass windows of the hospital chapel. The woman down the hallway screams. If God can love me, if God can forgive me, why can’t you?

On the fifth night the nurse gives me goldfish crackers to snack on. The first bite sends me through time and place to the first couch your parents ever bought. To everyone’s confusion, the memory makes me cry so hard I vomit.

Day six. After a sleepless night, I get up before breakfast. One of the other patients, a twenty-four year old kid, six feet tall and bulletproof, tells me it is my fault I’m here. “Maybe you should think about that.” I was 24 once, too, but I wasn’t so fucking mean. 

The doctor gently leads me into his office and asks me to sit, again, six feet away. “What are you thinking about?” the bear whispers. “I want to go home,” I whisper back. He nods his head and pauses, then stares through me for years. “Wednesday.” Today is Monday, and I could dance.

One week ago. I am thousands of miles from here, somewhere warm, explaining that I feel important when we hold hands, when you kiss me. “Am I being too needy?” “Yes.” And like magic, a year of my life evaporates into thin air. “Yes.” Every mistake I have ever made flashes in front of my eyes at once. “Yes.” My heart sinks through my stomach, falls out my ass, lands on the concrete with a wet squish. “Yes.” We are floating in space and drifting miles apart. “Yes.” The word is a dagger. “Yes.” I clock out, this time for good. “Yes.” I am the worst person in the world, and I must be punished. 

I go home the next night. I reach my bed and all at once I am rapt with pain and desperation. When I was eight years old my mother took a broken bottle to her wrists; I stumble through the darkness to my bathroom where I see her staring back at me from the mirror. I throw open the shower stall curtain and there she sits, limp on the tile. I close my eyes tightly. “No.” I open my eyes and I am sitting in the shower, limp and fading, running down the drain with the water. I am eight years old, I am hiding in the laundry room under piles of dirty clothes; I am twenty-nine years old, I am lying in my bed on top of piles of dirty clothes. “Yes.” I am ready. It is time. I am my mother’s child. Then, against my better judgment, I pick up the phone. “I am so proud of you,” the operator says in a soft and comforting voice. “You made the right choice calling us.” 

The seventh day is your birthday and it takes all of my strength to think of anything else. I read this story to my therapist and she calmly wipes away a tear. “This is not your fault. It’s not,” she sniffles, “it’s not your fault.” The woman in the hallway screams. It’s not her fault, either. 

I spend the day drawing portraits of the nurses and other patients. Once I finish the crayon drawings I silently hand them to their respective subjects. “Oh, my little one, my dear! You have made my day,” one of the nurses sings. She takes my hand. “You are so strong, so brave, and so, so talented,” she urges. “Remember to love yourself first.” 

When the seventh night comes, I stretch my time as long as I am allowed, staying up a half hour past curfew. In the morning I will leave and I feel a distant sense of fear and sadness towards the prospect. I will not miss cold food and cold showers, I will not miss the screaming, I will not miss the cop shows—but in this place, I am cared for and made to feel important (even if the people doing that are paid to do so). And in this place, I am frozen in between a time with you and a time without, and I am terrified. I lie down in my bed for the last time. I try to cry but nothing comes. “You made the right choice,” the operator says. I close my eyes and go to sleep.

Ben Wasserman's "Live After Death" — Saturday, July 30, 2022

I’ve been sitting on a joke for nearly two years now that I have never found a neat way to resolve and tell. The joke is as follows: 

When I was 16, one of my best friends died. I’m 29 now and I still get sad thinking about it… because two weeks before she died she borrowed a Wiimote from me, and I’m afraid I’ve missed the window of asking for it back. 

I’ve never once told, or even attempted to tell, this joke. I’ve written better jokes than this—and I’ve definitely written worse ones—but this joke has remained at the back of my mind for years now, enticing me to revisit it and to rework it, to change it, to mold it into something new. Reading it here now, it feels clunky and graceless. Is it even a joke, or is it just an attempt to find humor embedded in the process of losing a person I loved? I have found myself wrought with various fears surrounding this joke: fear of the joke failing; fear of my pain at the loss of my friend being misunderstood; fear of disrespecting her memory by making a joke about her death; fear of doing an injustice to her by simply not being good enough to make this kind of a joke. 

If Ben Wasserman shares these fears, I would never know it. 

I entered Sparrow Funeral Home in Brooklyn on the night of Saturday, July 30. Sparrow brands itself as “a contemporary funeral home;” a fitting subtitle as it feels akin to an art gallery, its walls occupied by large abstract works of art. Upon entering I was greeted with sparkling waters and a card which asked me to write on it the name of a loved one I had lost in my lifetime. I wrote my friend’s name, Chelsea, and turned the card over to reveal that on its back side was a bingo card. I entered the room that would hold the performance and found a seat near the front. The stage area was not an elevated stage but rather a clearing at the front of the room where a “set” stood. The set consisted of a curtain with multiple cardboard signs affixed to it—making up a sort of hardship tapestry—and a table containing a slew of objects (tissues, styrofoam balls, and other ephemera). A projector screen hung above the set. Everything was in its place. The show was ready to begin. 

Wasserman’s set for Live After Death

Now, I cannot speak to the opening act for every single iteration of Live After Death, but I can say that the opening act that I saw—stand up by comedian Martin Urbano—paired beautifully with Wasserman’s work, as if placed together by a comedy sommelier. In his comedy, Urbano effortlessly dances his way through some of our most difficult, distressing, and taboo topics. His setups prepare you to hear the worst (often leading to the audience preemptively recoiling) and his conclusions always turn the premise on its head, landing gracefully on innocuous and largely inoffensive punchlines. In this way, he incriminates the audience instead of himself; after all, he didn’t say anything wrong—but everyone else most certainly thought it. This push-and-pull rapport between Urbano and the viewer establishes a critical position for the audience early on as active participants in the show. They are laughing not just at how funny Urbano is, but also laughing at themselves. They fell into Urbano’s trap. They have been implicated. They are now a part of the show. 

When he finally takes the stage, Ben Wasserman’s introduction to Live After Death is one that is dynamic, over the top, and utterly deceiving. Featuring cartoonish combat, mild pyrotechnics, costume changes, and set to a soundtrack of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” it creates the expectation that what you are about to see is rooted in the absurd and is, perhaps, a flippant exploration of a serious topic. Instead, what follows is the most human and grounded-in-reality comedy show that I’ve ever experienced. 

Wasserman settles into the stage wearing a wild smile and a sudden, mismatched sincerity. He begins the show by presenting us with this fact: over the course of three years, Wasserman lost his grandfather, his father, his brother, and four of his friends. It is a shocking amount of loss, to say the least, and that is immediately visible in the room; the mood changes, the crowd grows tight and somber. Mere seconds ago laughter, explosions, and loud music were ringing out, and yet in this moment the room is silent, charged with sympathy. Despite this shift, Wasserman remains cool and in control of the room. He presents his ideas and the mission of the show: it is about (and itself is an exercise in) navigating a post-loved-one world. We lose people, yes, but one of the great tragedies of loss comes after the fact when we realize that the world continues on as if everything remains the same. Wasserman illustrates this in the most literal sense. 

With help from a somewhat reluctant audience member, Wasserman enters the next act of the show by juggling a set of balls on which the names of his loved ones are written. The audience member is instructed to add chaos to this act by tossing more balls into Wasserman’s juggling routine, each labeled with another obligation, responsibility, problem, or otherwise stressor, in Wasserman’s life. Despite receiving these instructions, the audience member selected for this task appears both hesitant and resistant to the action; she seems nervous and uncomfortable with being given the spotlight here, and her interactions with Wasserman seem combative and harsh. However, Wasserman champions onward, eventually convincing the audience member to fully participate in the act so that he may construct the visual metaphor. He is juggling all of his problems and, as he shows us by dropping every single ball thrown his way, he is doing it poorly.

Bingo brings yet another interactive element to Live After Death.

Despite being billed as a one man show, Live After Death actually ends up being composed of a massive cast of audience participants. Wasserman engages with the audience at a near-constant pace by seeking volunteers for various bits, asking questions of individual audience members, even giving away a prize to the bingo winner (which, coincidentally, happened to be me—many thanks to the couple near me who spilled their drink at the start of the show). Wasserman strikes a perfect balance of being both a madman and a beacon of empathy in these interactions. When the audience members are onstage participating in his bits, Wasserman is often comically boisterous and aggressive in his direction to them by shouting at them, playfully teasing them, and becoming visibly exasperated with the fact that they aren’t getting things perfect their first try. When Wasserman engages with the audience members one-on-one by asking about the losses they have suffered in their lives, though, he meets them only with patience, kindness, understanding, and empathy. Jokes are still made, yes, but never to the end result of causing pain; the space becomes one that is supportive and healing not just for Wasserman, but for everyone involved. For Wasserman, there is no way of knowing what these audience members will say or do when selected to speak or perform in the show, but he does a masterful job of navigating every heartfelt response to his questions, every fumbling of the actions he has instructed them to take, and every surprise that comes from having strangers play the largest part in what he refers to as his “big show.” Perhaps one of the core lessons to be learned from Live After Death is revealed through this involvement with the unknown: we cannot control the world around us—we can only control how we react to it.

I don’t want to give away the entire show, so I will not describe the rest of it in such detail; however, I will say this: for a show built on a morbid premise and set in a devastating and harsh reality, Live After Death is a deeply optimistic approach to the subject of death, and is packed from start to finish with pleasant surprises. At the end of the show, as I observed myself and multiple other audience members wiping tears from their eyes, it became apparent to me that Wasserman’s work here is nothing shy of a masterpiece. People stood and clapped. They embraced those who were sitting next to them. A fresh sense of intimacy and camaraderie hung in the air; what we witnessed was not simply a comedy show, but a show that exists at the intersection of alternative comedy, group therapy, and experimental performance. 

Tony’s Italian Tissues, the prize for the bingo winner. They’re not soft.

While over the course of the show Wasserman does reveal some details about the loved ones whose losses precipitated the show, I did not leave feeling like I had attended a memorial service for them. It would also be inaccurate to call Live After Death a celebration of their lives. All in all, I gained very little knowledge about them, and that seems to be part of the point. The show is not necessarily about the people Ben Wasserman lost; rather, it remains true to its name: for better or for worse, we live after death.