Cattelan's banana divides critics. Here are the positions of critics and journalists who commented on it

Comedian, the now-famous banana that Maurizio Cattelan installed in the Perrotin Gallery’s booth at the Art Basel Miami fair, has not only garnered widespread media coverage around the world, it has also divided critics, and there have been many critics and journalists who have commented on the Padua-based artist’s work, the first presented in the context of a fair after a 15-year absence.

The Guardian’s noted critic, Jonathan Jones, says the $120,000 banana should not be mocked. The banana, Jones writes, "mocks the market since it is patently not worth the price at which it is sold. As Damien Hirst said, merchants are unpleasant people who sell shit to idiots. Cattelan has been banging on the same point for years, but in a more humorous way. [...] Cattelan is enacting the tragicomedy of contemporary artists. When Duchamp chose the urinal or the snow shovel for his ready-made, no one thought they had commercial value: most were thrown away without a second thought. Today, the versions displayed in museums have been recreated many years after the time of the events, that is, when Duchamp became a hero of the conceptual art movement in the 1960s. Today, art cannot detach itself from money. The value of the work is all anyone wants to know about the work, and Dada gestures are part of the capitalist miracle. [...] Cattelan is a philosopher like his hero Duchamp. He does not think he can bring down the art market. On the contrary, the mordacious works he conceives in his role as an almost retired clown suggest a deep melancholy. Cattelan is the clown who must perforce continue to make people laugh even when he knows his jokes will be of no use. And Comedian is certainly a self-portrait of Cattelan. But he is not happy in his farcical clothes."

Jason Farago, art critic for the New York Times spoke of a “reluctant defense”: “as to the ontological status of the banana (whether a work of art or an agricultural product), I think that’s already been established. If you buy a Dan Flavin neon and the fluorescent bulb starts flickering, you can replace it with a new bulb. If you buy a Sol LeWitt mural and move, you can erase the old one and design a new one. A banana will require replacing even more than a light, and Cattelan has already suggested that lucky collectors replace the fruit every 7-10 days. As to why Cattelan’s banana has captured the public’s imagination, it is a question that has something to do with price and the ’emperor’s new clothes’ impression hovering around the international class of collectors who are fawning over the work at Art Basel. It also has something to do with the comic potential of bananas. I don’t think a pineapple stuck on the wall could have elicited the same load of virality.” Farago concludes, however, by reassuring the audience, “you are not a hopeless philistine if you find this to be quite absurd. Absurdity, and the frustrating feeling that a culture that once encouraged works of sublime beauty and now allows only silly jokes, is Cattelan’s trademark.”

Mark Hudson of theIndependent writes that "Cattelan’s banana story is one of people screaming at each other in the glossy bubble of the art world. Everyone who talks about it is an insider, and everyone is a winner. [...] Far from heralding change in the art world, the issue is simply another example of an iconoclastic gesture that has worked entirely to the art world’s advantage. If you want to shake the culture from the ground up, don’t do it at an art fair."

For Brian Kelly, critic for the Wall Street Journal, Cattelan’s banana is not just the latest offshoot of Duchamp’s ready-mades, nor does the point lie in the fact that food has many precedents in contemporary art. “The banana,” Kelly writes, "was conceived with the intent to be ridiculed. It exists to be mocked. Cattelan’s pedigree, after all, is one of works that take mockery from the rich and the elite. [...] With his new work, Cattelan has cast his critical eye on the art world itself, and it is a critique that should come as a shock to the system of indulgences in the contemporary scene, but probably won’t. Nothing can be more emblematic of divorce from reality than splurging $120,000 on a fruit that will rot on a wall simply because the guy who made it is semi-famous. And in that sense the banana could have been anything, because for the buyer it is not the work that matters but the purchase, and this is the latest example of the commodification that has defined the art trade since the 1980s."

Jerry Saltz, the celebrated critic for New York Magazine, entrusted his own thoughts on Cattelan’s work to his social accounts. “The art world as we have known it no longer exists except for a wealthy few. The cracks are visible. The rot. All this represents the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the art world, Meanwhile the rest of us 99.999% continue to beat ourselves up against the tide in this beautiful hunt. [...] Art will continue to be beautiful, and we will continue to be beautiful. But art-joke, art provocation, art about art about art: all this has been out of date for more than a decade now. Surely the idiot artists, collectors, dealers and critics do not see that taking this seriously is tantamount to turning the gun on themselves. Easy answers. Migrations are going on - art is on the move. Kisses.”

Also negative is critic Francesco Bonami, who told ARTnews, "Everyone, as always happens when Cattelan does something, has been talking about it. Apparently some idiot even bought it. The point is that the work does not exist. The opera is the fact that it is being talked about. If I go to an art fair and stand there with no underpants or no underwear, I expect people to talk about it, and write about me, and keep talking about me. The question is, does this add anything to the debate about art, culture, or society today? Cattelan is a genius, but Cattelan presenting the banana is like Leonardo da Vinci pointing a pencil -- totally irrelevant -- folklore. Like a street performer making giant soap bubbles. I’m sure the street artist would be very happy to receive $120,000 for one of his soap bubbles. And sometimes I wonder why collectors don’t do something provocative, instead of always playing the minions of the usual artists. And comparing the banana to Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void is idiotic and also slightly insulting to art history."

Melissa Chen, from the columns of Spectator USA, speaks of “BananaGate”: the affair, according to the journalist, "seems to have triggered the same wave of anti-elitism and distrust of power that is fueling populist movements such as the Brexit and the yellow vests that have been raging on the streets of Paris for a year. Like the mortgages and credit default swaps that accompanied the 2008 crisis, the banana attached to the wall is an internal provocation within the art world, a complex tool that enriches crowds of champagne-drinking collectors who then turn to us, crude philistines, who cannot understand these subtleties. Comedian has successfully managed to provoke emotions, generate hype and activate discussions. It allowed Art Basel to monopolize national media and online discussions, and it brought in so many audiences that the Perrotin gallery decided to remove the banana on the last day of the fair for security reasons. [...] In the age of trolls, Maurizio Cattelan has pulled off the ultimate prank."

Roberto Ago in Artribune also speaks of Cattelan’s banana: "iThe sense of the visual arts of every age and place is anthropological and ritualistic, before being aesthetic, lopening and chattering count today more than weighing progressively worn-out fetishes with acrimony, so much so that criticism has all but died out. The more discussion the artist makes, even riding on doped or equivocal works, the more valid and performing he will be deemed. The logic of advertising and communication is basically the same as religious consensus, only the advertisements change. Comedian condenses all this, he is, so to speak, its antonomastic totem, while Cattelan 2.0 appears in splendid form. This does not mean that each of his works scores with the same enjoyment of the viewer, who expects, from an art professional like him, a few more erotic shrewdnesses."

A comment, finally, also on Finestre Sull’Arte, by Federico Giannini, according to whom "Comedian is a work that, however you want to think of it, finds an extremely coherent place in Cattelan’s path: it is pure theater, it is a spectacle within a spectacle, it is a new drama of which Cattelan is the director (a director of those who perhaps care little or nothing about the audience’s reaction), and of which we are spectators whose job it is to decide how we find the play: we can be amused, sad, serious, bored, furious, know-it-all, indifferent, rancorous, frustrated. It does not matter. And equally little does it matter whether the work actually sold or not, or whether Cattelan’s work is considered, all things considered, as uninnovative as it actually is, or as inevitably anchored in his postmodern language: after all, even when we visit any museum of art history we see legions of artists who are little or not at all innovative. The interest that Cattelan continues to arouse also lies in the fact that we are all ready to become more or less involved spectators dogni più minuscule action that flashes through his mind."

Cattelan's banana divides critics. Here are the positions of critics and journalists who commented on it

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