NEW YORK – Go to any supermarket and you can generally buy a banana for less than $1. But a banana stuck to the wall? This could sell for more than $1 million at an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
The yellow banana fixed to the white wall with silver glue is a work titled “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 comment on the state of the art world? Another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it. A spare banana was brought. The selfie-seeking crowds became so thick that “The Comedian” was pulled from view, but three prints of it sold for $120,000 to $150,000, according to the Perrotin gallery.
Now, the concept artwork has an estimated value of between $1 million and $1.5 million at Sotheby’s auction in November. 20. Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, calls it profound and provocative.
“What Cattelan is really doing is turning a mirror on the contemporary art world and asking, thought-provoking questions about how we value works of art, what we define as a work of art,” Galperin said. .
Bidders will not purchase the same fruit that was exhibited 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 Cattelan’s Comedian is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that gives the owner permission and authority to reproduce this banana and tape on their wall as an original work of art by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin . said.
The very title of the piece suggests that Cattelan himself probably did not intend to be taken seriously. But Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, said it’s worth thinking about the context.
Cattelan premiered the work at an art fair attended by wealthy art collectors, where “Comedian” was sure to get a lot of attention on social media. This could mean that the art constituted a kind of courage for collectors to invest in something absurd, she said.
If “The Comedian” is just a means of understanding the insular, capitalist, art-collecting world, Cooper Jones said, “it’s not such an interesting idea.”
But she thinks she can go beyond making fun of rich people.
Cattelan is often thought of as a “con artist,” she said. “But his work is often at the intersection of the humorous and the deeply macabre. He often looks at ways to provoke us, not just for the sake of provoking us, but to ask us to look at some of the darker parts of history and ourselves.”
And there is a dark side to the banana, a fruit with a history tangled with imperialism, labor exploitation and corporate power.
“It would be hard to come up with a better and simpler symbol of global trade and all its uses than the banana,” said Cooper Jones. If “The Comedian” is about making people 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 some kind of additional place to gone about the questions that could be the job,” she said.
“The Comedian” goes on the block at the same time that Sotheby’s is also auctioning one of the famous paintings in the “Water Lilies” series by French impressionist Claude Monet, with an estimated value of about $60 million.
When asked to compare Cattelan’s Banana to a classic like Monet’s Nymphéas, Galperin says Impressionism wasn’t considered art when the movement began.
“No significant, profound, meaningful work of art of the last 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, provoked some kind of concern when it was first discovered,” Galperin said.
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