On a stark white wall at a Miami art exhibition, a piece of duct tape was fastened to a single banana. The artwork, named Comedian, sold for $120,000.
In fact, Comedian found three buyers. How could three buyers buy one artwork? Well, they were buying the concept. They can duct-tape any old banana to their walls and brag, with the artist’s approval, to their friends, “That’s Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan.”
The artwork, sold at the international Art Basel, an annual event held in Miami early this month, has created quite a stir.
“The genius of Cattelan’s banana is that it draws out the mainstream media’s suspicion that all contemporary art is a type of emperor’s new clothes foisted on rich people,” art dealer Bill Powers told Vogue. “Was it Warhol who said, ‘Art is whatever you can get away with’? Case in point.”
Whether or not Comedian was meant to make such a statement, it’s certainly peak Dada, the 20th-century art movement characterized by satire and nonsense.
Two days after the artwork went on display, while viewers were snapping pictures in front of the banana, a performance artist ate it. David Datuna told reporters that he would have eaten the banana earlier in the day, “but I was not too hungry.” He was escorted out of the exhibit.
A day later, the artwork was vandalized again, this time replaced with the words “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself,” written with red lipstick. Police arrested Roderick Webber on charges of criminal mischief.
“It was clear to me that Maurizio and the gallery had coordinated with Datuna as a publicity stunt,” Webber said the next day. “So, if they allowed it, great — but if they pressed charges, it would expose them as the frauds they are. They had me arrested — so now we know who they are and the kind of people the art world are comprised of.”
Webber’s message, a reference to the conspiracy theory that sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself when he died in his prison cell earlier this year, had little to do with Cattelan’s banana. But it was a fittingly absurd ending to the saga of the absurdist artwork, even if Webber didn’t quite get away with it.
