New York – Go to any supermarket and you can usually buy a banana for less than $1. But a banana stuck to the wall? It could sell for more than $1 million at an upcoming Sotheby’s auction in New York.
The yellow banana mounted on a white wall with silver duct tape is a piece titled “Comedian” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It first debuted as a three-fruit version at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in 2019, where it became a much-talked-about sensation.
Was it a prank? A comment on the state of the art world? The second artist took the banana off the wall and ate it. A backup banana was brought. The selfie-seeking crowd became so overwhelming that “Comedian” was removed from view, but three versions sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, according to the Perrotin Gallery.
Now, the conceptual artwork has an estimated value of between $1 million and $1.5 million at a Sotheby’s auction on November 20. Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, calls it profound and provocative.
Galperin said, “What Catalan is really doing is holding a mirror up to the contemporary art world and asking questions, thinking about how we value artworks, what we see as artworks.” Let’s define in.”
Bidders will not purchase the same fruit that was displayed in Miami. Those bananas are gone long ago. Sotheby’s says the fruit should always be replaced with tape regularly.
“When you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ it is not a banana, but a certificate of authenticity that allows the owner to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan.” And empowers,” Galperin said.
The title of the piece itself suggests that Cattelan probably did not intend for it to be taken seriously. But Chloe Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, said it’s worth thinking about the context.
Cattelan premiered his work at an art fair visited by well-known art collectors, where the “comedian” certainly had to attract a lot of attention on social media. That said, it could mean it’s time for art collectors to have the courage to invest in something so absurd.
If “Comedian” is merely a tool for understanding the insular, capitalist, art-collecting world, Cooper Jones said, “it’s not that interesting an idea.”
But she thinks it goes further than making fun of rich people.
Catalans are often considered “trick artists”, he said. “But his work is often at the intersection of humor and deep grimness. He often finds ways to provoke us, not just to provoke, but to ask us to look at some of the darkest parts of history and ourselves.
And there is a dark side to the banana, a fruit whose history is entangled with imperialism, labor exploitation and corporate power.
Cooper Jones said, “It would be difficult to create a better, simpler symbol of global trade and all its exploitations than the banana.” If “Comedian” is about making people think about their moral complicity in the production of goods they take for granted, then it’s at least a more useful tool or it at least helps those There’s an additional kind of place to go in terms of questions that may be asking for work,” she said.
The “Comedian” hit around the same time that Sotheby’s is auctioning one of French impressionist Claude Monet’s famous paintings from the “Water Lilies” series, which is estimated to be worth about $60 million.
When asked to compare Cattelan’s Bananas to a classic like Monet’s “Nymphaeus,” Galperin says Impressionism was not considered art when the movement began.
Galperin said, “No significant, profound, meaningful artwork of the last 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, caused any kind of discomfort when it was unveiled for the first time.”
