The Banana That Broke the Internet: Maurizio Cattelan's 'Comedian' Heads to Auction
"To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value. At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules."
No other artwork from the twenty-first century has provoked scandal, sparked imagination, and upended the very definition of contemporary art like Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, whose debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019 captivated the world. Comprised of a banana fastened to a wall with duct tape, hung exactly 160 centimeters from the floor, Comedian belongs to the rare league of artworks that need no introduction, having quickly erupted into a viral global sensation that drew record crowds, social media inundation, landed the cover of The New York Post, and divided viewers and critics alike. Passionately debated, rhapsodically venerated, and hotly contested – and eaten not only once, but twice – the work headlined news stories shared around the world, becoming the most talked-about artwork of the century.
Today, Cattelan’s duct-taped banana sits firmly at the head of an art historical hall of infamy, alongside the renegade minds who made controversy, jest, and ideological rupture part of the fabric of contemporary art. If it was Duchamp who legitimized appropriation through the invention of the readymade, Piero Manzoni who satirized the sanctity of artistic creation, Felix Gonzalez-Torres who supplanted the physical artwork with an idea, and Jeff Koons who deified the iconography of the banal, then it is Cattelan’s Comedian that represents the apex of a hundred year-long, intellectual yet irreverent interrogation of contemporary art’s conceptual limits. Conceived in an edition of three plus two artist proofs, one edition is held in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which mounted the artist’s revolutionary retrospective in 2011-12. Evoking and advancing the strategies of his predecessors with sardonic and subversive wit, Cattelan – in his greatest coup to date – single-handedly prompted the world to reconsider how we define art, and the value we seek in it. We may be in on Cattelan’s joke, but Comedian is anything but.
On the opening day of Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019 when Comedian’s installation at Perrotin’s booth was unveiled, crowds swarmed for the opportunity to see Comedian in the flesh. Such pandemonium ensued that the work had to be deinstalled before the end of the fair, with all three editions of Comedian sold. In a matter of days, Comedian had earned its status as a universally recognizable image and become folded into a legacy of propulsive masterworks that incited radical recalibrations for their time, from Édouard Manet’s Olympia at the 1865 salon, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain at the 1917 Society of Independent Artists, to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde-pickled shark at the Royal Academy of Art in 1997. What visitors were so invested in – and what collectors had actually purchased – was not the literal banana and piece of tape, but rather a certificate of authenticity and instructions for installation. Reflecting on the inspiration for the components of Comedian, the artist reflected, “I was trying to imagine something to symbolize my love of New York, and it was difficult … There was a time when the Greek coffee cups were everywhere, and I thought somehow the banana was something that now you can find at every street corner. And [my thinking about this] goes on forever from there – but for sure an eggplant, say, would not have been so effective … In my apartment, the pipes are held together with [duct tape] – I always say that I’d be more concerned if I ran out of that tape than out of toilet paper.” (the artist quoted in: Christopher Bonanos, “Maurizio Cattelan Duct-tapes Banana to Wall, Makes $240,000, Credits New York,” Vulture, 8 December 2019 (online))
-
1917Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
Philadelphia Museum of Art
In 1917 at the Society of Independent Artists in New York, Marcel Duchamp presented a readymade porcelain urinal as his submission. Turned over, mounted on a pedestal, and signed by the artist in 1917, Fountain marked the genesis of appropriation’s inextricable role in twentieth century artmarking.
“I was trying to imagine something to symbolize my love of New York, and it was difficult … There was a time when the Greek coffee cups were everywhere, and I thought somehow the banana was something that now you can find at every street corner. And [my thinking about this] goes on forever from there – but for sure an eggplant, say, would not have been so effective … In my apartment, the pipes are held together with [duct tape] – I always say that I’d be more concerned if I ran out of that tape than out of toilet paper.”
Comedian’s theoretical origins can thus be traced back to the Duchampian readymade, the genesis of a larger ontological schism which decentered craft, rarity, and technical mastery in favor of the conceptual value assigned by the artist. It not only summons the audacity of Duchamp’s readymade inverted urinal or mustache-defaced L.H.O.O.Q. but represents the apogee of a storied legacy, one elaborated by Robert Rauschenberg, whose Erased de Kooning Drawing further destabilized notions of artistic originality, and carried into the present day by Banksy, whose Love is in the Bin self-destructed in real time in Sotheby’s London salesroom in 2018. Commandeering this historic mode of iconoclastic pranksterism that provoked our ways of seeing art and the merits of its value, Cattelan found his subject in the banana: the vaudeville peel that serves as slapstick punchline. “To me,” the artist reflected, “Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value. At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules.” (the artist quoted in: Gareth Harris, Maurizio Cattelan: “'Life is often tragic and comedic at the same time,’” The Art Newspaper, 30 November 2021 (online)) His use of average, hardware store duct tape further destabilizes Comedian’s tenuous attachment to the very walls which sanction its status as art and, by extension, confronts how our barometers of taste are established with deadpan candor.
“I was trying to imagine something to symbolize my love of New York, and it was difficult,” the artist reflected. “There was a time when the Greek coffee cups were everywhere, and I thought somehow the banana was something that now you can find at every street corner. And [my thinking about this] goes on forever from there — but for sure an eggplant, say, would not have been so effective … In my apartment, the pipes are held together with [duct tape] — I always say that I’d be more concerned if I ran out of that tape than out of toilet paper.”
Cattelan has carved a niche for himself as the art world’s shrewd provocateur, the anti-establishment, archetypal Shakespearean fool who has shaped not only the art made but also the role of the artist themself. Deliberately positioning himself as the dialectical antipode to the trope of genius creator, Cattelan has invoked a spirit simultaneously “aspirational yet ironic; comic yet critical; and elusive yet instantly 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.” (Nancy Spector quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Maurizio Cattelan: All, p. 41) Absurdity in Cattelan’s work is routinely trumped up to its absolute ceiling; profane, hyper realistic sculptures are executed at life-sized scale, with no detail spared. In 2019, however, when Cattelan unveiled his first work for an art fair in fifteen years, he didn’t trumpet his comeback with the pageantry of John F. Kennedy’s embalmed corpse, the phallic fuchsia costume once worn by Emmanuel Perrotin at the artist’s behest, or a taxidermied horse, cow, or ostrich. He instead made his reentry with something so decisively banal that it allowed him to distill the 30 year-old aims of his artistic enterprise whilst proving his protean brilliance: a banana taped to a wall, a stroke of ingenuity that has spawned an entire discourse and artistic sensation.
The Shot Seen 'Round the World: Media Coverage of Comedian
Ever self-referential, Comedian’s title suggests its status as Cattelan’s magnum opus, and perhaps even a self-portrait, a masterpiece achieved only by means of incessant provocation and desecration. Unlike Banksy, there is no deception to be uncovered in Cattelan’s work. For Cattelan, who has adopted a kind of Pop sensibility, the lunacies of the real world provide enough fodder for appropriation, using the iconography of the everyday to probe the dissolution between art and life and what each informs of the other. Frankly and flippantly, he lays bare what has always been in front of us, an idea literalized in his retrospective Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which the artist promoted with the (unrealized) promise of his retirement. His entire oeuvre hung suspended — simultaneously evoking crystal chandeliers and carcasses of meat — from the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda, in a dizzying and definitive testament to the strategy of suspension which has remained paramount in his oeuvre. In Comedian, it takes the form of duct tape, a medium he first deployed in A Perfect Day from 1999, which strapped his Milan dealer Massimo De Carlo to a wall. For the ways that his work disrupts and challenges us, he is as much a tragedian as he is the eponymous comedian.
Cattelan liberates art from the realm of the sacred to return it to the secular world. Antic and anarchical, unorthodox and ingenious, Comedian rightfully stands among the prescient masterpieces found in Koon’s Rabbit or Warhol’s 100 Marilyns, both of which literally and metaphorically held the mirror to the face of contemporary art and shrugged off skepticism with their firmly reactionary stances. Teasing the line between crude prank and catalytic conceptual inquiry, Cattelan’s oeuvre, legible as both a glut of spectacle and incendiary scrutiny of art’s tenets, finds its coda in Comedian.
