A performance artist ate a $120,000 banana. But is it art?
‘PROVOCATIVE’ ACT MADE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA AGE
On Saturday afternoon, a 45-year-old performance artist named David Datuna visited the annual showcase Art Basel in Miami Beach, and ate one of the installations. It was a banana duct-taped to a wall, and it had been created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, under the title Comedian. The piece was valued at $120,000 US — two extant editions of the installation had already been sold to private collectors at that price. The third, said a spokesperson for the Parisian Galerie Perrotin, which brought the piece to Art Basel, was to be sold to a museum for $150,000.
Datuna didn’t eat the banana on a whim. He did it in the name of art. Datuna recorded a video of himself removing Comedian from the wall of the gallery and eating the banana in its entirety.
“Art performance, art performance,” he is seen reassuring passersby with his Georgian-accented English, as he swiftly dismantles the piece. “Hungry artist.”
The video, which Datuna posted to Instagram page on Saturday, has been viewed at the time of this writing more than 180,000 times. Thousands of people have left comments, calling him everything from an idiot to a genius.
Of course, Datuna is hardly the first person to frame an act of destruction as a covert act of creation, and the history of art is rife with prominent examples of just this kind of addition, subtraction, and recontextualization — of messing with the status quo as an act of punkish defacement.
In the spring of 1985, making his way to a podium for a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was hit in the face by a cream pie. The stunt was the handiwork of the so-called “philosophical provocateur” Noël Godin, who later claimed to have orchestrated the stunt as a concerted attack on “worthless celebrities” — a kind of stunt protest intended as its own subversive work of art.
Godin’s confectionary assault made international headlines.
There was confusion about his motives. Some misunderstood the pieing as a demonstration against Godard’s 1985 film Hail Mary, which had offended the religious and been denounced by the Catholic Church; others assumed the caper was political, or that Godin was airing some obscure grievance.
But even as the commentariat debated the artistic merits of Godin’s antics — whether he was a legitimate performance artist inveighing against the pretensions of the French cultural elite or just a rabble-rouser seeking a sliver of second-hand fame — it seemed obvious that the discussion was the point. Godin wanted attention, and he got it in spades — simply by disrupting an event and doing something unexpected.
If Godin managed to attract worldwide interest in his clowning in the mid-1980s, imagine what he might have accomplished with an Instagram profile in 2019. To stoke debate about the legitimacy of an artistic prank today, there is apparently no better platform.
But in the age of internet trolls and popular prank videos, Datuna’s mischievous gallery meal hasn’t exactly shocked the mainstream, and if his endeavour was a success, it’s not so much as radical provocation as sly self-promotion.
Like Banky’s self-shredding Sotheby’s auction last fall, Datuna’s daring snack feels a bit too self-consciously sensational. Is it art? Or is it just a viral video?
Interestingly, the effect of Datuna’s destructive prank hinges on the extraordinary value of the installation he consumed: the attention he’s attracted has as much to do with what the ducttapped banana was worth as it does the destruction qua destruction.
Suddenly, a whole lot of people who have never heard of Maurizio Cattelan and had no idea there were pieces of fruit being sold to collectors for six figures are being confronted with the story of the man who dared eat the overpriced produce.
And naturally, to anyone who balks at the notion that a banana could seriously be considered art, Datuna’s going to seem like a sort of brazen folk hero. What he did seems different somehow than if he’d, say, defaced a Rembrandt. The self-evident frivolity of the art he destroyed is exactly what makes it seem okay.
Datuna has insisted that his performance was not a criticism of the original piece. He’s an admirer of Cattelan’s work; he compares the banana to Marcel Duchamp’s fountain, the most famous example of an effort to challenge our idea of what constitutes art.
“I love Maurizio Cattelan artwork and I really love this installation,” Datuna wrote beneath the video of him eating the banana on Instagram. When asked by reporters whether he worried that Cattelan would be angry, he said he didn’t think so, “because I respect him, I love his art, and he has a lot of good humour in his work too.” Cattelan, Datuna said, is “a genius, and genius never gets upset.”
Like Godin, Datuna wanted to attract attention, and he certainly managed to. The formula was essentially the same: high-profile target with an air of sophistication, outrageous gesture meant to surprise and upset.
The difference is that Datuna didn’t need to wait on the media to report on his escapade — he went straight to social media, where it was destined to be seen, discussed, and debated.
He may not have actually shocked anybody, the world being long accustomed to stunts and pranks of all kinds. But he did get a whole lot of people who have never heard his name to start talking about David Datuna. It’s not exactly art, but in 2019 that surely constitutes success.
DATUNA’S DARING SNACK FEELS A BIT TOO SELFCONSCIOUSLY SENSATIONAL. IS IT ART? OR JUST A VIRAL VIDEO?