Last night, November 20, Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019), a work consisting of a banana channel taped to a wall, sold for $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction.
This is wrong.
It’s beyond wrong. It’s obscene and immoral. It’s the ugliest display of excess I’ve seen in a long time.
I’m not naive. As an editor at an arts publication, I recognize the power of spectacle, and I’ve covered several gimmicky, record-breaking auctions.
But that didn’t stop my blood from boiling as I watched the bid quickly rise to about six times the original estimate. I didn’t expect it, but my stomach hurt.
The billionaire who bought the banana, crypto investor Justin Sun, may also have felt something in his stomach as he threw out bid after bid. Perhaps it was the distant echo of a starving child’s growling stomach.
When it first appeared on the walls of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, “Comedian” was hailed as a brilliant critique of the art market’s grotesque detachment from any economic rhyme or reason, let alone artistic merit. But I don’t think Cattelan’s “joke” was ever in good faith. The Italian artist swims in the same swamp as those he pretends to parody. The muddier the waters, the better they thrive.
It’s only fitting that the everyday banana was bought by a crypto bro who also conjured his fortune out of thin air. But once the work became a personal investment object, it lost every ounce of irony it might have once possessed. ‘Comedian’ has become more valuable than the works of art that Cattelan pretended to mock by pasting up the fruit at an art fair. The snake ate its tail. The mask has become the face. The fool has become the king.
