THAT’S BANANAS!
Artist behind stolen gold toilet sells banana taped to wall for £91,000 – twice
IT took a year for maverick artist Maurizio Cattelan’s latest masterpiece to come to fruition.
His chosen subject was a sculpture shaped like a banana.
He made several models, first in resin, then in bronze but couldn’t decide how to finish it – until, he says, he woke up one day and realised: ‘The banana is supposed to be a banana.’
So, in the end, Cattelan, creator of the solid gold toilet worth £4.8million that was stolen from Blenheim Palace this year, used a real banana and stuck it to the wall with a piece of grey duct tape.
His back-to-basics method certainly paid off: he has already sold two to private collectors for £91,000 each. The price of a third edition, titled ‘Comedian’ and on display at an art exhibition in America, has been reportedly raised to £114,000 and is expected to be sold to a museum. According to the Perrotin gallery, which is showing the work at Art Basel Miami Beach, the fruit on display was ‘locally sourced’ from a supermarket in Miami and the work ‘offers insight into how we assign worth and what kind of objects we value’. Potential owners were, however, warned they will have to replace the original banana as needed, perhaps every few days. The first two sold on the exhibition’s opening day, each reportedly to French buyers.
Art journalist Sarah Cascone posted on Twitter that visitors to the exhibition were ‘gawking at the work, photographing it, and even posing with it – sometimes for selfies’. Other critics hailed it for lampooning the art world’s excesses.
Andrew Russeth, from ARTnews, said: ‘For many, Comedian is an object lesson in the excesses of the art world, the absurdity of the art market, and the gaping wealth inequalities that now define the global economy’. Twitter has gone bananas over Comedian too, with one user asking: ‘Has the art world reached peak absurdity?’
Italian Cattelan, 59, told Artnet he was partly inspired by the large number of paintings he has recently seen at galleries, adding: ‘I’m not in Miami, but I’m sure it’s full of paintings as well.
‘I thought maybe a banana could be a good contribution!’