The auction house Sotheby’s has just written a new chapter in the history of art. And the fruit. Both at the same time. Yesterday late afternoon, during a bidding held in New York, Sotheby’s closed the sale of the work ‘Comedian’, a creation by the Italian Maurizio Cattelan, for a total amount of 6.2 million dollars. So far nothing exceptional. The figure is large, true; but nothing that has not been seen before in the sometimes hyperbolic art market, where sums of seven figures (or even more) have been asked for an NFT or paid hundreds of millions for works of controversial authorship.
The surprising thing about ‘Comedian’ is not, however, its Price, but its nature. The work is not a sculpture. Not a painting. Not even a typical performance. No.
Cattelan’s work is neither more nor less than a fresh banana stuck to the wall with thick gray adhesive tape. And no, there is nothing special about the banana, except for the fact that it is accompanied by a certificate from Cattelan that certifies it as one of his works. In fact, the one that was auctioned yesterday in New York had been bought that same day at a fruit stand in Manhattan for just 35 cents.
Exactly, the price of the banana if we understand it as a material for artistic creation represented 0.00000005% of the amount for which ‘Comedian’ ended up being sold just a few hours later.
It’s not a banana, it’s art
Click on the image to go to the tweet.
To understand what happened yesterday, it is necessary to go back a few years, to 2019, when Cattelan presented at the fair Miami Art Basel one of his most peculiar works. The Italian creator had already surprised before with ‘La Nona Ora’, an effigy of Pope John Paul II hit by a meteorite; or ‘America’, a functional toilet made of solid 18-karat gold, but with its new creation, ‘Comedian’ wanted to go one step further.
The work was a banana.
To be precise, a fresh, ripe banana taped to a wall, exactly 160 centimeters from the ground. Not one more, not one less. For Cattelan it was a satire, a creative critique of art market speculation designed to raise a question in the viewer: “On what basis does an object acquire value in the art system?”
It may sound strange, but three editions of ‘Comedian’ were released (plus “two artist’s proofs”, says Sotheby’s) and the proposal generated more than considerable expectation at Art Basel Miami Beach. So much in fact, that the Perrotin gallery ended up selling the pieces for a good amount: between 120,000 and 150,000 dollars.
The pieces, of course, included something else: a certificate of authenticity in which the work is described in detail. That way, when the banana goes bad after a few days, the owner of ‘Comedian’ can go to the supermarket or his trusted fruit store, spend a tiny amount, like the 35 cents on the banana that was auctioned yesterday at Sotheby’s, and replace it.
That a banana taped together was sold for 120,000 euros in an art gallery was so shocking that Cattelan’s proposal caught the attention of media outlets within the reach of The GuardianArtnet, USA Today, CBS News, Newsweek News o New York Postwhich even dedicated its cover and a huge headline to it in its December 6, 2019 edition. The phenomenon was helped by the fame and interest that Cattelan aroused, famous long before for other works, such as his pure gold toilet.
“Within days, ‘Comedian’ had earned its status as universally recognizable image“, they recall from Sotheby’s. In their opinion, Cattelan’s adhesive banana has now become part of a select club of disruptive works that includes ‘Olympia’, by Édouard Manet, or ‘Fountain’, by Marcel Duchamp. In fairness, another artist, David Datuna, contributed to the fame of the piece, who in an even more delirious twist decided to create his own performance based on the famous banana In December How? 2019, ripped it off the gallery wall and ate it.
Click on the image to go to the tweet.
With that story behind him, one of the ‘Comedian’ works (that is, the Cattelan certificate, since each banana lasts only a few days) ended up at Sotheby’s for auction. There was talk that the work could fetch between 1 and 1.5 million dollars and in fact the bidding started at 800,000 dollars.
All those figures fell short. Very short. After several offers submitted by seven interested people, the famous banaba with ribbon and certificate ended up being awarded a sum large enough to Buy several houses: $6.2 million, including the auction commission.
“I never imagined I’d say ‘five million dollars for a banana,'” joked the auction manager, Oliver Barker, when the bids were already moving away from the 1.5 million initially estimated. After all, just a few hours earlier the same banana had been bought at a fruit stand near the Upper East Side of Manhattan for a third of a dollar.
The million dollar question at this point is obvious…Who submitted the offer of more than six million for ‘Comedian’? The answer is almost as interesting as the work itself. The lucky one was Justin Sun, another well-known face for several reasons, such as having promoted the network blockchain TRON or more recently having become the prime minister of the libertarian micronation Liberland.
In exchange for your generous outlay you will receive a banana, a roll of masking tape, a certificate of authenticity and instructions on how to install the work or reassemble it when the fruit rots and you have to return to the fruit shop in search of more. The piece will join others that Justin Sun has acquired over the years, including a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti for which he spent more than $75 million in 2021.
“It is not a simple work of art, but represents a cultural phenomenon that unites the worlds of art, memes and the cryptocurrency community,” Sun proclaimed in a statement in which he vindicates the value of ‘Comedian’. “I believe that this piece will inspire more reflection and debate in the future and that it will become be part of history.” In that same spirit, Sun says he will follow Datuna’s example and eat the banana to “honor his place in the history of art and popular culture.”
Artistic and market valuations aside, one thing is clear: it is probably the most expensive banana in history.
Images | Sotheby ́s Wikipedia
In WorldOfSoftware | Half a century ago, NASA fed cockroaches with lunar dust. Now you can bid on them
