Something weird is happening to irony. It's losing. The New Yorker's critics have formally noticed that sincerity is staging a cultural coup, from Project Hail Mary to Lena Dunham's memoir. At the same time, Harmony Korine, whose career was built on transgressive incoherence, is retrospectively reframing all of it as a single earnest gesture. And The Ordinary's $175 banana campaign is doing something genuinely strange: using the aesthetic of price-gouging to critique the industry that made them rich. That's a triple-axel of sincerity.
When Critique Becomes the Product
The Ordinary's stunt is easy to dismiss as meta-marketing. But the execution is precise. By literally selling a banana at a grotesque markup and labeling it with wellness buzzwords, the brand is doing what Korine claims he's always done: using the surface of absurdity to expose the machinery underneath. The question Artnet's Min Chen raises about Korine's retrospective, whether a shape-shifting career can cohere retroactively into one "whole work," is exactly the question The Ordinary's brand managers have answered with a piece of fruit. The answer is: only if the joke is sincere. Slawn's trajectory from Lagos skate crew to global commercial artist follows the same arc. The earnestness isn't incidental to the career. It is the career.
Sincerity as Market Signal
A 2023 paper in Poetics by Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton on organizational identity noted that authenticity claims function as market signals regardless of their truth content. Which means earnestness, even when performed, still works as differentiation in a market saturated with detached cool. The cultural graph is consistent: irony made sense when institutions were stable enough to push against. When the institutions are crumbling, earnestness becomes the more radical posture. The Ordinary didn't sell you a banana. They sold you a proof of concept.