Stroll into any grocery store and you’ll typically purchase a banana for lower than $1. However a banana duct-taped to a wall? That may promote for greater than $1 million at an upcoming public sale at Sotheby’s in New York.
The yellow banana fastened to the white wall with silver duct tape is a piece entitled “Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It first debuted in 2019 as an version of three fruits on the Artwork Basel Miami Seashore truthful, the place it grew to become a much-discussed sensation.
Was it a prank? A commentary on the cutting-edge world? One other artist took the banana off the wall and ate it. A backup banana was introduced in. Selfie-seeking crowds grew to become so thick, “Comedian” was withdrawn from view, however three editions of it bought for between $120,000 and $150,000, in response to Perrotin gallery.
Now, the conceptual paintings has an estimated worth of between $1 million and $1.5 million at Sotheby’s public sale on Nov. 20. Sotheby’s head of latest artwork, David Galperin, calls it profound and provocative.
“What Cattelan is actually doing is popping a mirror to the modern artwork world and asking questions, scary considered how we ascribe worth to artworks, what we outline as an paintings,” Galperin stated.
Bidders will not be shopping for the identical fruit that was on show in Miami. These bananas are lengthy gone. Sotheby’s says the fruit at all times was meant to get replaced recurrently, together with the tape.
“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin stated.
The very title of the piece suggests Cattelan himself doubtless did not intend for it to be taken severely. However Chloé Cooper Jones, an affiliate professor on the Columbia College College of the Arts, stated it’s price interested by the context.
Cattelan premiered the work at an artwork truthful, visited by well-off artwork collectors, the place “Comedian” was certain to get a whole lot of consideration on social media. That may imply the artwork constituted a dare, of kinds, to the collectors to spend money on one thing absurd, she stated.
If “Comedian” is only a instrument for understanding the insular, capitalist, art-collecting world, Cooper Jones stated, “it’s not that interesting of an idea.”
However she thinks it would transcend poking enjoyable at wealthy individuals.
Cattelan is usually regarded as a “trickster artist,” she stated. “But his work is often at the intersection of the sort of humor and the deeply macabre. He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”
And there’s a darkish facet to the banana, a fruit with a historical past entangled with imperialism, labor exploitation and company energy.
“It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana,” Cooper Jones stated. If “Comedian” is about making individuals take into consideration their ethical complicity within the manufacturing of objects they take without any consideration, then it is “at least a more useful tool or it’s at least an additional sort of place to go in terms of the questions that this work could be asking,” she stated.
“Comedian” hits the block across the identical time that Sotheby’s can also be auctioning one of many famed work within the “Water Lilies” sequence by the French impressionist Claude Monet, with an anticipated worth of round $60 million.
When requested to check Cattelan’s banana to a basic like Monet’s “Nymphéas,” Galperin says impressionism was not thought-about artwork when the motion started.
“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled,” Galperin stated.
