Unbelievable. Cattelan's banana up for auction for $1 million

$1 million for Cattelan’s banana. Comedian, the celebrated banana taped to the wall, a 2019 work by Maurizio Cattelan (Padua, Italy, 1960) will indeed go to auction at Sotheby’s, with an estimate of $1 to $1.5 million. It will be the highlight of the Now and Contemporary Evening Auction to be held in November in New York. Before that, however, the work will be shown in several cities: it will kick off with a one-day exhibition on Monday, Oct. 28, in New York, which will be followed by a world tour that will touch London, Paris, Milan, Hong Kong, Dubai, Taipei, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, before returning to New York for exhibition before the Nov. 20 auction.

The story of Cattelan’s banana

It was December 2019 when Cattelan presented Comedian by his gallerist Perrotin at Art Basel Miami Beach, and that work immediately became the most talked about work of the moment. “For me,” Cattelan would say two years later, "Comedian was not a joke; it was an honest commentary and reflection on what we value. At art fairs, speed and business reign supreme, so I saw it this way: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana the way others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my own rules." Her initial appearance on the contemporary art scene drew crowds, divided viewers and critics, and caused such pandemonium that Perrotin removed her from her booth before the end of the fair. Revered and hotly contested (and eaten not just once, but twice: the first time by the late Georgian artist David Datuna, the second time by a Korean student), the work made headlines around the world. No other work of art in the twenty-first century has provoked controversy, ignited the imagination and upset the very definition of contemporary art as Cattelan’s Comedian.

Comedian stands, according to Sotheby’s, within an art-historical legacy of conceptually bold masterpieces that have redefined what art could be: from Marcel Duchamp’s Fontaine, an upside-down readymade porcelain urinal mounted on a pedestal and signed with a pseudonym in 1917, through Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing , when one legendary artist defaced the work of another to destabilize notions of artistic originality to Damien Hirst’s 1991 Shark under Formaldehyde and Banksy’s Love is in the Bin, a work shredded after being sold in Sotheby’s auction room in 2018, thus creating a new work of art in real time. And then, the ubiquitous banana taped to the cover of the New York Post and became an inevitable media phenomenon. The work was conceived in an edition of three copies plus two artist’s proofs-one example is held in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Why Cattelan’s banana matters

“The most influential and radical artworks of the last century,” says David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art for the Americas, "have had the power to radically change perceptions of the very nature of art. In this spirit, Comedian is a provocative work of pure genius. Balancing deep critical thinking and subversive wit, this is a work that defines the artist and our generation. With a single brilliant gesture, Cattelan has shaken the foundations of the art world and brought art to the center of mainstream popular culture. If deep down Comedian questions the very notion of the value of art, then putting the work up for auction this November will be the ultimate realization of his essential conceptual idea: the public will finally have a say in deciding its true value."

Cattelan’sComedian has indeed prompted the world to reconsider how we define art. As mentioned, the origins of Comedian can be traced back to the Duchampian ready-made: just as Duchamp transformed a urinal into a seminal modern artwork by boldly signing the ready-made with a pseudonym, “R. Mutt,” Cattelan brings the mundane into the extraordinary by exploiting the systems of art display and reception. Through its presentation and context, Cattelan elevates the everyday object to the realm of art, following in the footsteps of Dada and Warhol, for whom the idea, or concept, was of paramount importance, more important than the process of creation. The title itself, Comedian, is a self-portrait of the former enfant terrible of contemporary art: a masterpiece achieved only through provocation, humor and desecration. Cattelan uses humor to probe the distinction between art and life through a distinctly Pop sensibility. “When art makes us feel something and puts us in an uncomfortable position, that’s when it has an impact,” Cattelan said. And then, if you will, it’s also a distillation of his artistic output: a banana taped to a wall, a medium Cattelan first used in 1999’s A Perfect Day , which tied his dealer Massimo De Carlo to a wall. “Actually,” says the artist, “I think reality is much more provocative than my art.... I just take it; I always borrow pieces, crumbs, actually, from everyday reality.”

Maurizio Cattelan’s provocations

Maurizio Cattelan is among the most brilliant provocateurs in contemporary art. He has consistently disrupted the status quo of the art world in significant, irreverent and often controversial ways. Cattelan’s post-Duchampian penchant for the absurd is evident in his critiques of social and cultural norms, executed through a wide variety of media, from sculpture and taxidermy to performance and curatorial efforts. Describing her work, curator Nancy Spector wrote, “It is ambitious yet ironic; comic yet critical; and elusive yet immediately accessible, given its pop sensibility. Like a seasoned outlaw, Cattelan navigates a fine line between what is socially and culturally acceptable and what is not.”

Cattelan has exhibited his work around the world, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2000), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2003), the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2004), and the Menil Collection in Houston (2010). In 2011, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted a major retrospective of his work, entitled All. Cattelan has also participated in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2011) and the Whitney Biennial (2004). The artist’s auction record was set in 2016, when his Him sold for $17.2 million.

Unbelievable. Cattelan's banana up for auction for $1 million

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