NEW YORK (AP) — Walk into any supermarket and you can generally buy a banana for less than $1. But a banana canal taped to the wall? That could sell for more than $1 million at an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
The yellow banana attached to the white wall with silver duct tape is a work entitled ‘Comedian’ by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It first debuted in 2019 as a three-fruit edition at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, where it became a much-discussed sensation.
Was it a joke? A commentary on the state of the art world? Another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it. A spare banana was brought in. The selfie-seeking crowd grew so large that “Comedian” was removed from view, but three editions of it sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, according to Perrotin Gallery.
Now the conceptual artwork has an estimated value of between $1 million and $1.5 million at Sotheby’s auction on November 20. Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, calls it profound and provocative.
“What Cattelan is really doing is holding a mirror up to the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking reflection on the way we assign value to works of art, what we define as a work of art,” said Galperin.
Bidders won’t buy the same fruit that was on display in Miami. Those bananas are long gone. Sotheby’s says the fruit was always intended to be replaced regularly, along with the tape.
“What you are buying when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that gives the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on the wall as an original work of art by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin said.
The title of the piece alone suggests that Cattelan himself probably had no intention of taking it seriously. But Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, said it’s worth thinking about the context.
Cattelan premiered the work at an art fair frequented by wealthy art collectors, where “Comedian” was sure to receive a lot of attention on social media. That could mean the art posed some kind of challenge to collectors to invest in something absurd, she said.
If “Comedian” is just a tool for understanding the insular, capitalist world of art collecting, Cooper Jones said, “then it’s not that interesting of an idea.”
But she thinks it goes beyond making fun of rich people.
Cattelan is often seen as a “cheater,” she said. “But his work is often at the intersection of humor and the deeply macabre. He very often looks for ways to provoke us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look at some of the darkest parts of history and of ourselves.
And there is a dark side to the banana, a fruit with a history intertwined with imperialism, labor exploitation and corporate power.
“It would be difficult to think of a better, simpler symbol for global trade and all its exploitations than the banana,” said Cooper Jones. If ‘Comedian’ wants people to think about their moral complicity in the production of objects they take for granted, then it’s ‘at least a more useful tool, or at least an additional kind of place to go in terms of the questions this raises. work can be questions,” she said.
“Comedian” hits the market around the same time that Sotheby’s is also auctioning one of the famous paintings from French Impressionist Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” series, with an expected value of about $60 million.
When asked to compare Cattelan’s banana to a classic like Monet’s “Nymphéas,” Galperin says that Impressionism was not considered art when the movement began.
“Not a single important, profound, meaningful work of art from the last 100 or 200 years, or our history for that matter, caused some discomfort when it was first unveiled,” Galperin said.
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Follow Julie Walker on X @jwalkreporter.