Walk into any supermarket and you can usually buy a banana for less than $1. But a banana taped to a wall? That could be sold for more than 1 million dollars at an auction in Sotheby’s New York.
The yellow banana attached to the white wall with silver adhesive tape is a work titled Comedianby the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It was first presented in 2019 as a three-fruit edition at the fair Art Basel Miami Beachwhere it became a sensation.
Was it a joke? A comment on the state of the art world? Another artist removed the banana from the wall and ate it. He brought a reserve. The selfie-seeking crowds became so dense that Comedian It was removed from view, but according to the Perrotin gallery, three editions of the work were sold for between 120 and 150 thousand dollars.
Now, the piece of concept art has an estimated value of between $1 million and $1.5 million at Sotheby’s auction. The head of contemporary art at the auction house, David Galperindescribes it as deep and provocative. “What Cattelan is really doing is putting a mirror to the world of contemporary art and ask questions, provoke reflection on how we assign value to works of art, what we define as a work of art,” he reflects.
Bidders will not be buying the same fruit that was displayed in Miami. Those bananas are long gone. Sotheby’s says the fruit was always meant to be replaced regularly, along with the ribbon. “What you buy when you buy Comedian by Cattelan is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that gives the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and the masking tape on their wall as an original work of art by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin specifies.
And Comedian is just a tool for understanding the insular, capitalist world of art collectors, Cooper Jones says, “not that interesting of an idea.” But she thinks it could go beyond making fun of rich people.
Cattelan is often thought of as a “joker artist,” he says. “But his work is often at the intersection of kind of humorous and deeply macabre. He often looks for ways to provoke us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the darkest parts of history and 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 find a better, simpler symbol of global trade and all its exploitations than the banana,” says Cooper Jones. Yeah Comedian tries to get people to think about their moral complicity in the production of objects they take for granted, then it is “at least a more useful tool or at least an additional place to go in terms of the questions this play might be raising,” he said.
Comedian goes up for auction around the same time that Sotheby’s is also auctioning one of the famous paintings from the series water lilies of the french impressionist Claude Monetwith an expected value of around $60 million.
When asked to compare Cattelan’s banana to a classic like Water lilies of MonetGalperin says that Impressionism was not considered art when the movement began. “No important, profound or significant work of art of the last 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first introduced,” Galperin reports.
Source: AP
(Photos: EFE/EPA/Rhona Wise; Ronn Torossian via REUTERS; REUTERS/Eva Marie Uzcategui; Kena Betancur/AFP)
