Maurizio Cattelan’s viral 2019 art piece Comedian is forecasted to sell for $1.5 million this November, which is a big price to pay for a banana and duct tape.
Currently sitting in the Sotheby’s auction house, Comedian is a piece that displays a fresh banana stuck to the wall with a diagonal strip of duct tape. The piece first rose to fame in 2019, when it was sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in Miami Beach and dubbed the “Art Basel Banana.”
As a conceptual artist, Cattelan’s work relies on the meaning and context behind the art, not the visual work itself. This is best represented through his famous work from 2016, in which he placed a functioning 18-carat-gold toilet in New York City’s Guggenheim Museum and called it America.
According to a statement from Galerie Perrotin, the original gallery the piece appeared in, Cattelan did not originally plan to include a real banana in his piece. He experimented with resin, bronze and bronze paint before determining that his message could be best conveyed through a 30-cent banana from a Miami grocery store.
While the piece was assigned a high monetary value in the art world, others have criticized the piece for its simplicity.
Performance artist David Datuna responded to the piece and its critiques by taking the banana off the wall and eating it, calling his performance “Hungry Artist.” He says this was done out of appreciation for Cattelan, but the act subsequently led to a slew of other people attempting to do the same thing, causing the piece to be removed from its original installation location in Miami amidst “public safety concerns.”
A visitor to Seoul’s Museum of Art also ate the banana during Comedian’s installation at the museum, justifying his choice by simply saying that he was hungry.
Despite the lighthearted response to the piece, Cattelan said that his work was not an attempt to be humorous; rather it was a response to the concept of value in relation to art.
“At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: If I had to be at a fair, I could sell my banana like others sell their paintings,” said Cattelan. “I could play within the system, but with my rules.”
Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in the Americas, David Galperin, commented on the irony of the piece’s exploration of value and its increasing bid for their upcoming auction.
“If at its core, Comedian questions the very notion of the value of art, then putting the work at auction this November will be the ultimate realization of its essential conceptual idea — the public will finally have a say in deciding its true value,” said Galperin.
Whoever splurges on the piece will be provided with a fresh banana, a roll of duct tape, a set of instructions for how the art should be displayed and a certificate of authenticity.
As the banana is fresh and frequently replaced at its installations, the piece’s price tag revolves more around owning the conceptual idea behind the piece rather than the piece itself.
Sotheby’s “Now and Contemporary” auction is to take place on Nov. 20 in New York, reaffirming what the value of a 30-cent banana is to the art world.