Back-to-back typhoons are tearing through villageshumanitarian crises Are furiousand so is New York City so dry it burns – but tonight, November 20, in the cocoon bubble of a Sotheby’s salesroom on the Upper East Side, a banana has just been sold for $6.2 million.
This wasn’t just any banana, of course, but rather a banana selected for artist Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ (2019), his infamously sparse artwork featuring the yellow fruit channel taped to a white wall. But just like our hopes and dreams, this banana will eventually rot, and it will need to be replaced with a new one (“the banana and duct tape can be replaced if necessary,” a Sotheby’s representative explained). And at that moment it will really be so each banana – with its soft and mushy insides, its inevitable brown spots and its fraught legacy of colonialism and exploitation.
I dutifully inquired about a press ticket to attend the sale and witness the spectacle in person. A Sotheby’s spokesperson politely declined due to “capacity limitations” and as a consolation, offered to deliver a bottle of Sotheby’s signature champagne for me to enjoy while I “experienced the auction from the comfort of home.” The mental image of me popping the cork of my Auction House branded bubbly out of my couch on Wednesday night while streaming the sale on my aging MacBook was so hilariously anticlimactic that I briefly considered live blogging about it a la Drunken history.
But ultimately I decided it just wasn’t going to be that exciting, and I was mostly right. Lot 10, Cattelan’s “Comedian” came on around 7:26 p.m., right between one of Richard Prince’s Nurse paintings and a seventies Suzanne Jackson cloth so painfully beautiful that it made it even worse. Auctioneer Oliver Barker’s nervous introduction (“I’m not sure what to expect here”) was followed by a rhythmic volley between several bidders on the phone, a paddle in the room and an ambitious online bidder. Six minutes later, the hammer finally fell to $5.2 million ($6,240,000, including house costs) thanks to a telephone bidder with Jen Hua, head of Sotheby’s China. The buyer, it was announced in an email shortly afterwards, was Chinese collector Justin Sun, owner of BitCurrent and founder of the crypto platform Tron. This is not surprising, as this was the only lot in the sale eligible for payment in cryptocurrencies and that two coins inspired by Cattelan’s work – the Solana-based “Banana Tape Wall” ($VAT) and a token called $BAN started by an employee of Sotheby’s – are contained in thousands of digital ‘wallets’. That information, and the fact that Sun ever paid almost as much for a chance to have lunch with Warren Buffetshould tell you everything you need to know about the bro energy surrounding this auction.
Sun said in the email that he plans to “personally eat the banana” in the coming days as “part of this unique artistic experience.”
“Comedian” made its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, where Perrotin Gallery reportedly sold three editions of the work for between $120,000 and $150,000 each; one of these was later donated to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The edition that went under the hammer tonight was the second in the series, which also includes two artist’s proofs. A provenance section below the lot description on Sotheby’s website notes that the work changed hands three times: first when it was initially purchased by a private collector at the fair, then when it was acquired by the international gallery White Cube, and again when it was purchased by its most recent owner before this sale. That’s right: over a five-year period, three buyers paid what I can only assume were escalating prices for the rights to stick a banana on the wall and call it art, and each of them ultimately decided that they didn’t want it. (White Cube has not yet responded to a request for comment.)
But every banana has its day, and the PR machine has largely successfully, if shamelessly, embedded “Comedian” into a line of irreverent conceptualism that Sotheby’s catalog essay goes back to Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) and Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917). The work “stands firmly at the head of an art historical hall of infamy alongside the renegade spirits who have made controversy, jokes and ideological rupture part of contemporary art,” the essay reads, seemingly using as many words as possible without any hint of criticism. touch of discernible irony. Instead, you might comment here on the banana’s status as one of the world’s most important crops, symbolizing United Fruit Company’s efforts. disastrous policies in Central America, and as a lasting representation of ongoing labor violations, as explored in projects such as Blanca Serrano and Juanita Solano’s 2022 digital exhibition La Fiebre del Banano / Banana Madness.
But what if “Comedian” is what we all know deep down: a solipsistic statement, an overpriced fruit, a bad work of art that can’t even pack the satisfying punch of a gimmick? Like the poorly executed art world satire that secretly revels in what it purports to criticize, Cattelan’s piece holds up a mirror to nothing. Sun, tonight’s bidder, has not acquired “a part of history,” as he said in a statement; he bought a banana and a roll of tape.
