Walk into any supermarket and you can generally buy a banana for less than a dollar.
But a banana stuck to the wall? It could sell for more than $1 million ($1.55 million) at an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
A yellow banana attached to a white wall with silver adhesive tape is a work titled “Comedian” by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelano. It first debuted in 2019 as a three-fruit edition at Art Basel Miami Beach, where it became a much-discussed sensation.
Was that 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 large that “Comedian” was pulled from the show, but three editions of it sold for between $US120,000 ($185,632) and $US150,000 ($232,040), according to the Perrotin Gallery.
Now, the concept artwork has an estimated value of between US$1 million and US$1.5 million ($1.55 million and $2.32 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 turning a mirror on the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking thinking about how we assign value to works of art, what we define as a work of art,” Galperin said.
Bidders will not buy the same fruit that was displayed in Miami. Those bananas are long gone. Sotheby’s says the fruit should always have been changed regularly, along with the ribbon.
“What you’re buying 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 duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin said.
The very title of the work 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 considering the context.
Cattelan premiered the work at an art fair frequented by affluent art collectors, where “Comedian” was sure to get a lot of attention on social media. That could mean the art challenged 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, “it’s not such an interesting idea.”
But she thinks it could go beyond making fun of rich people.
Cattelan is often considered a “con artist,” she said. “But his work is often at the intersection of a kind of humor and the deeply uncanny. He quite 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 ourselves.”
Australia makes ‘small progress’ in returning looted Nazi art
“It would be hard to think of a better, simpler symbol of global trade and all its exploitation than the banana,” Cooper Jones said. If “Comedian” wants to encourage 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 place to go in terms of the questions that this work might be asking,” she said.
“The Comedian” comes up for sale around the same time Sotheby’s is also auctioning off one of French impressionist Claude Monet’s famous “Water Lilies” paintings, with an expected value of around US$60 million ($92.82 million).
When asked to compare Cattelan’s Banana to classics like Monet’s “Nymphéas,” Galperin says Impressionism wasn’t considered art when the movement began.
“No important, deep, meaningful work of art in the past 100 or 200 years, or our history for that matter, has caused some kind of discomfort when it was first presented,” Galperin said.