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It’s been five years since the art world was taken by storm by a piece that was literally just a banana duct-taped to a wall, and someone who dropped six figures to add it to their collection will seemingly get a very solid return on that investment when it hits the auction block next month.
In 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan managed to create quite a stir at Art Basel in Miami when he affixed a banana to a wall with a piece of duct tape at a gallery that quickly found itself flooded by visitors who wanted to get a glimpse of the artwork he dubbed Comedian.
That stunt was the latest in the long line of unconventional exhibits that have raised questions about what can truly be considered “art,” but Cattelan did pretty well for himself after listing three official editions for sale before selling two of them for $120,000 and a third to a patron who dropped $150,000 (especially when you consider the bananas cost him around 30 cents a pop).
The nature of Comedian means the banana and the duct tape used to secure it need to be routinely replaced, and while it’s theoretically easy to copy on your own, each sale was accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and diagrams and instructions concerning the exact manner in which it should be mounted and displayed.
One of the editions was anonymously donated to The Guggenheim in New York City, while another eventually ended up in a museum in South Korea where a visitor took a bite out of the banana when it was being shown in 2023 (which mirrored the “incident” where a fellow raconteur took the fruit off the wall and ate it during the original Art Basel run in a piece of performance art they called Hungry Artist).
Now, Comedian will be hitting the auction block for the very first time courtesy of Sotheby’s, which will be listing it alongside pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jasper Jones in an upcoming auction where it estimates the second edition of the artwork will fetch between $1 million and $1.5 million when the bidding closes in a sale that will kick off on November 20th.
What a world.