Million-dollar banana? Infamous artwork goes on auction

Would you buy a banana for a million dollars? If you have that kind of money to spare, you can bid on one that's part of an artwork by Italian-born Maurizio Cattelan titled "Comedian." 

No, it's not a banana made of solid gold; it's your regular old edible banana, affixed to the wall with a piece of duct tape.

Cattelan, a conceptual artist known for satirical and provocative work, caused a stir with this piece back at the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair in 2019. The Perrotin gallery sold three editions of it at prices ranging from $120,000 to $150,000.

'Essential conceptual idea'

In a 2021 interview with The Art Newspaper, Cattelan said: "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."

The piece was the talk of the art world for a while, with some critics calling it a brilliant commentary on consumerism and art itself, and others saying it was one of the worst works to be exhibited at that year's fair.

And now it's being auctioned by Sotheby's New York, which estimates that it will sell for $1-1.5 million (€940,000-1.4 million). But don't worry: the winning bidder won't be getting a moldy fruit, or even a preserved one: What they'll get is a fresh banana, a roll of duct tape, and extensive instructions on displaying the work, along with a certificate of authenticity.

So much like NFTs, what you're buying isn't the actual, physical work crafted by the artist's hands, but the idea of the artwork — which, after all, is what conceptual art is all about.

"If at its core, 'Comedian' questions the very notion of the value of art, then putting the work at auction this November will be the ultimate realization of its essential conceptual idea — the public will finally have a say in deciding its true value," the auction house's head of contemporary art for the Americas, David Galperin, said in a statement

A banana on a different level

One of Cattelan's peers, Georgian performance artist David Datuna, found nutritional value in the work: At Art Basel Miami Beach, he untaped the banana and ate it, in an artistic intervention he titled "Hungry Artist." 

In a 2019 interview with The Guardian following the act, Datuna was critical of the work's being sold for so much money, but said of Cattelan: "I think he is a genius. Art is about comedy, about fun, about tragedy, about emotions. He played this very well. I love the banana of Andy Warhol, but I think Cattelan has put the banana on a different level."

American pop artist Andy Warhol, who had a background in advertising, made almost fetishistic objects out of ordinary household items, including bananas.

Warhol used this motif for the iconic cover of the album "The Velvet Underground & Nico," creating a sticker of a yellow banana skin that peeled off to reveal an oddly pink fruit underneath.

But, unlike Cattelan's banana, where the high sale price is determined by its scarcity, Warhol intended his work to be endlessly reproduceable and suited for a mass market.

In true Warholian style, he never copyrighted that iconic banana image, leaving the door wide open for other artists to use it.

One of those is German artist Thomas Baumgärtel, who has spray-painted his version of Warhol's banana on the facades of more than 4,000 museums and galleries worldwide since 1986, turning the yellow fruit into a kind of symbol denoting art itself.

Sometimes a banana is not just a banana

The banana has often been used for symbolic effect in art. Its phallic shape has made it a cipher for male sexuality — as suggested by the Warhol work mentioned above — but also in works by painters like Frida Kahlo, while its tropical origins make it a useful element of the exotic for European artists.

Both of those elements are at play in "Consumer Art," a video and photo work from the 1970s by pioneering Polish feminist artist Natalia LL, who depicted a model slowly and suggestively eating several food items, including a banana. That work is provocative not only for its sensual element — which led Poland's National Museum to remove it from an exhibition in 2019, prompting widespread ridicule — but also because at the time it was made, bananas were a luxury item in Poland, then part of the Soviet bloc.

With climate change and a fungal pathogen threatening some banana crops and driving up prices, it's possible the fruit could again become an exotic luxury.

And then Maurizio Cattelan's million-dollar banana might not seem quite so absurd anymore.

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier