Artist Maurizio Cattelan’s viral (and infamous) duct-taped banana piece, “Comedian,” is going under the hammer again, and may fetch over one million dollars.
Maurizio Cattelan’s famous “Comedian” is heading to auction once more. The piece, composed of nothing but a banana duct taped onto a wall, drew worldwide attention when it sold for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami in 2019. Now, it could sell for even more than that (over one million to $1.5 million, specifically) in the Now & Contemporary Evening Auction of Sotheby’s New York on November 20, 2024.
The piece will also be going on a world tour across ten different cities—including New York, London, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo—from October 28 to November 8, 2024.
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Just A Banana…
Cattelan purchased the original or first banana for “Comedian” from a market for around $0.30, reports Luke O’Neil for The Guardian. He then had it duct taped onto the wall, with instructions to replace these simple materials in every installation, adds Oscar Holland of CNN.
The Sotheby’s piece in particular is number two from an edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs.
Unlike your average banana, “Comedian” attracted large crowds throughout Art Basel Miami Beach, as well as international attention through social media and other notable publications like The New York Times. Artist David Datuna even ate another installation of the piece that was supposed to be sold to a museum for $150,000—a daring statement done without the permission of Cattelan, but one that aligned with Datuna’s work of making big, site-specific statements or performances, as he explains to Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian.
Then in 2023, the piece made headlines once more while it was held at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, as an student from Seoul National University took the banana off the wall and ate it because he “was hungry.”
In a way, Datuna and the student’s stunts were sobering (and kind of hilarious) reminders of the piece’s ephemeral nature. Cattelan himself admitted in a Vogue interview with Elise Taylor, that people do not buy the banana itself, but rather, the concept behind it.
“In this case, you aren’t actually buying the work itself—it’s a banana. It’s going to rot. What are you buying, then? The certificate of art. Essentially you bought the idea rather than the object,” he explains.
Despite the ubiquitous nature of its elements, “Comedian” is not something one can easily get their hands on. Renowned British artist Damien Hirst attempted to get an edition of “Comedian” in 2020, according to Anny Shaw of The Art Newspaper, but was turned down by Cattelan (even if he offered to swap it with a piece of his own). Thankfully, friend and curator Francesco Bonami, made his own version of the work as a consolation prize for Hirst.
…Or Is It?
Conceptual art has always been a hotly debated topic (especially when it comes to pieces that utilize everyday objects anyone can buy). As its name suggests, the genre is often more concerned with the ideas behind a work and the ways in which viewers interact with it, rather than the finished piece, which leads many to question what exactly constitutes art and defines its value.
The simplicity of “Comedian,” which borders on ridiculous, is likely what Cattelan meant to achieve. The Italian artist has made a name for himself through satirical pieces with a tongue-in-cheek kind of humor. Take his piece “America,” an 18K gold-cast toilet that he initially had installed into a restroom at the Guggenheim museum, encouraging visitors to use it.
“Its participatory nature, in which viewers are invited to make use of the fixture individually and privately, allows for an experience of unprecedented intimacy with a work of art,” writes the museum in a statement on the piece. “Cattelan’s toilet offers a wink to the excesses of the art market but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all—its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity.”
Likewise, perhaps the “Comedian” is just what its title implies: the catalyst for a good laugh. Viewers— with their jabs, ridicules, guffaws, and expressions of astonishment — become a part of the piece, which pokes fun at itself each time it sells for exorbitant prices.
“Comedian” shows the world how people ascribe value to certain objects — and if it all seems very arbitrary, maybe that is the point.
Banner photo from the Sotheby’s website.
