Maurizio Cattelan, “Comedian” (2019) was supplied at Sotheby’s with an estimate of $1–1.5 million (picture courtesy Sotheby’s)
Again-to-back typhoons are ripping via villages, humanitarian crises are raging, and New York Metropolis is so dry it’s burning — however tonight, November 20, within the cocooned bubble of a Sotheby’s salesroom on the Higher East Aspect, a banana has simply offered for $6.2 million.
This was not simply any banana, after all, however relatively one chosen for artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019), his notoriously sparse art work that includes the yellow fruit duct-taped to a white wall. However very similar to our hopes and goals, this banana will finally rot, and it should be switched out with a contemporary one (“the banana and duct tape can be replaced as needed,” a Sotheby’s consultant defined). And at that time, it actually will simply be any banana — with its comfortable and mushy inside, its inevitable patch of brown spots, and its loaded legacy of colonialism and exploitation.
Dutifully, I inquired a couple of press ticket to attend the sale and witness the pageantry within the flesh. A Sotheby’s spokesperson politely declined attributable to “capacity constraints,” and as a comfort, she supplied to ship a bottle of Sotheby’s signature champagne to get pleasure from as I “experience the auction from the comfort of home.” The psychological picture of me popping the cork of my public sale house-branded bubbly from my sofa on a Wednesday night time whereas streaming the sale on my growing old MacBook was so hilariously anticlimactic that I briefly thought-about dwell running a blog it à la Drunk Historical past.
Left: “Comedian” at Perrotin’s sales space at Artwork Basel in 2019; center and proper: two non-sanctioned bananas my stepdad says he noticed on the honest (photographs by and courtesy Bruno Lopez)
“Comedian” made its debut at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside in 2019, the place Perrotin Gallery reportedly offered three editions of the work for between $120,000 and $150,000 every; certainly one of these was later donated to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The version that went beneath the hammer tonight was the second within the collection, which additionally contains two artist’s proofs. A provenance part beneath the lot description on Sotheby’s web site notes that the work modified palms 3 times: first when it was initially bought by a non-public collector on the honest, then when it was acquired by the worldwide gallery White Dice, and as soon as extra when it was purchased by its most up-to-date proprietor earlier than this sale. That’s proper: Over a interval of 5 years, three consumers paid what I can solely assume have been mounting costs for the rights to tape a banana to a wall and name it Artwork, and every of them in the end determined that they didn’t need it. (White Dice has not but responded to a request for remark.)
See, that’s the factor with you bananas — you suppose everyone seems to be in love with you however really, everybody hates you.
However each banana has its day, and the PR machine has largely efficiently albeit shamelessly couched “Comedian” in a lineage of irreverent conceptualism that Sotheby’s catalog essay traces again to Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) and Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917). The work “sits firmly at the head of an art historical hall of infamy alongside the renegade minds who made controversy, jest, and ideological rupture part of the fabric of contemporary art,” the essay reads, seemingly utilizing as many phrases as doable and not using a trace of perceptible irony. One may as a substitute provide commentary right here on the banana’s standing as one of many world’s most vital crops, as a logo of United Fruit Firm’s disastrous insurance policies in Central America, and as an everlasting illustration of ongoing labor violations, as explored in initiatives like Blanca Serrano and Juanita Solano’s 2022 digital exhibition La Fiebre del Banano / Banana Craze.
However what if “Comedian” is what all of us deep down understand it to be — a solipsistic assertion, an overpriced fruit, a nasty art work that doesn’t even rise to the satisfying punch of a gimmick? Very similar to poorly executed art-world satire that secretly relishes in what it purports to critique, Cattelan’s piece isn’t holding up a mirror to something. Tonight’s high bidder didn’t purchase a bit of historical past — they purchased a banana and a roll of tape, and they need to know higher.
