When the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel in 2019 and called it Comedian, it caused immediate uproar. First it was eaten by a passing ‘performance artist’, then it was defaced by an Epstein truther, and taken off display due to “uncontrollable” crowds. Then it was eaten again. Nothing could be more controversial, though, than its price tag: $120,000 for a literal banana and a piece of duct tape.
In the end, three people bought Comedian (none of them Damien Hirst, to his dismay). What were they thinking? Why did they throw their money away on a glorified grocery shop? Well, the art market moves in mysterious ways, and it turns out it was a pretty good investment. Next month, one of the artworks is going on sale at Sotheby’s, and the auction house estimates it will fetch $1 million to $1.5 million.
Why? A very good question. In an article on the lot, Sotheby’s places Cattelan’s artwork in a tradition that dates back to 1917, when Marcel Duchamp debuted his urinal artwork Fountain. Works by Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst, and Banksy share this “spirit of iconoclastic pranksterism,” it says, even changing the apostrophe in its logo into a mini replica of the so-called sculpture. All the press and memes around the infamous banana probably haven’t hurt its value either, with one version of Comedian already held in the collection of the Guggenheim in New York.
In terms of what you’re actually buying (assuming you have $1 million lying around in the first place), the Comedian auction includes an actual banana and a piece of duct tape. Of course, that banana will go rotten pretty quick, so the lucky buyer will also get instructions on how to ‘install’ a fresh one, alongside the all-important certificate of authenticity.
All of this is a bit ironic, of course. Back in 2021, Cattelan described the artwork (in an interview with The Art Newspaper) as a “sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value” amid art fairs where “speed and business reign”. Three years later, the banana’s set to be flipped for ten times the price, and the conversation about what’s valued in the art business remains as slippery as ever.