The taped banana by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan will be sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York on November 20, 2024. This controversial work, named “Comedian”, a banana taped to a white wall, was purchased by a collector French 120,000 dollars in 2019.
“Comedian” is a banana taped to a wall that the artist Maurizio Cattelan offered to the Art Basel exhibition, in Miami Beach, in 2019. The Italian had the habit of taping a banana to the wall of his hotel during his visits to Miami to find inspiration for his next works.
Then the taped banana was acquired in 2019 by a French collector, instantly making him the laughing stock of much of the world. Stop laughing: the banana is estimated today at between a million and a million and a half dollars.
The smartest people are already asking themselves this question: wouldn’t a 2019 banana at this price have become compost in the meantime? The answer is yes. The banana is changed every six days. Because it is not the taped banana that we buy, but the idea of taping a banana to a wall.
A work twice devoured
Hang in there, it’s not over yet. The first banana was eaten shortly after it was presented in Miami by another artist, in what was called a performance. Then the banana was eaten a second time in Korea by a young man who justified himself, as reported by Beaux Arts Magazine, by declaring: “Isn’t it stuck there to be eaten?” Before adding that he considered Cattelan’s work as a rebellion against authority, and that in this sense, his gesture should be interpreted as “another rebellion against rebellion”.
The icing on the cake was that Maurizio Cattelan was cleared of accusations of plagiarism by an American artist who had already taped a banana and an orange against a wall. While the public cannot believe their eyes, some art critics like Sebastian Smee of the Washington Post do not hesitate to speak of a “giant fraud”, before quickly retracting.
According to Emmanuel Perrotin, Cattelan’s gallery owner, “his work forces us to question the value given to material goods.” During the day, bananas cost 2.80 francs per kilo. Let us thank Maurizio Cattelan for offering us the opportunity to reproduce an expensive work inexpensively.
Pierre Philippe Cadert/mh
