An urgent message to starving artists the world over–why eat your groceries if you can lob them on the wall for a $1,499,999 mark-up? The viral duct-taped banana art installation ‘Comedian’, brainchild of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, is headed for auction at Sotheby’s on Nov. 20, where it’s expected to fetch anywhere between $1 million and $1.5 million from some perfectly sensible, presumably potassium-deficient bidder. “We are looking at an ordinary banana and an ordinary piece of duct-tape. However what makes the ordinary extraordinary is the intention of the artist who put this together,” as Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, so convincingly explains it. “There is, simply put, no other artwork of the past 100 years that has provoked the kind of response that Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ did upon its installation at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019.” Which is a good thing, obviously. In any case, whoever does eventually walk away with the piece, which has already fallen victim to hungry gallery-goers, naturally won’t be buying the notorious original fruit, which has long gone the way of fertilizer. Instead, they’ll be forking out a pretty penny to not only regularly replace the banana themselves, but also the tape affixing it to the wall of their home. If you’re pressed for cash you might consider the budget alternative–but then that’d be missing the ‘point’, wouldn’t it?
