So, A Banana Walks into an Art Fair

One of the earliest recorded instances of a sculpture taking the piss out of the art world came when Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Insisting that sheer artistic will could impart the most banal objects with artistic value, he titled his urinal Fountain, and the bit absolutely killed. That’s the setup to Comedian (2019), a joke Maurizio Cattelan made more than a century later by duct-taping a banana to an art fair wall in Miami Beach. Arguably one of the most visibly worthless works to be shown in the commercial context, the punchline was that it sold for US$120,000. I bet Cattelan laughed all the way to the bank.

Many would argue that Comedian embodies elitist decadence at its most offensive, and I would say they are correct. Last week at Sotheby’s, the work auctioned for the ridiculous sum of US$6.2 million, to a crypto billionaire, no less. When detractors dismiss the piece as lazily derivative, however, I have to disagree. Retelling a joke the audience has already heard a thousand times is essentially the forward march of art history, where every new art world prank is basically another pissing contest with Duchamp’s Fountain: the point is to see how much further yours can go. Comedian is thus both a decent work of art and a pretty spectacular joke.

Cattelan is part of a long line of comedians who have added a twist of salesmanship to Duchamp’s bit by attaching a price tag to the abstract notion of artistic value. Establishing the comedic role of the artist as grifter, Cattelan’s predecessors include Piero Manzoni, who in 1961 canned his own shit at the fluctuating price of its weight in gold (Artist’s Shit), and David Hammons, who in 1983 sold snowballs outside in the dead of winter (Bliz-aard Ball Sale).

‘Every new art world prank is basically another pissing contest with Duchamp’s Fountain: the point is to see how much further yours can go.’

More recently Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF expanded the tradition to e-commerce, using their website to sell such questionable ready-mades as the individual dots of a Damien Hirst print (88 Holes, 2020). As insult comics, these artists perpetually test the boundaries of their audience; making art world values the butt of the joke. It’s a specific genre in which the point of sale confirms the artistic proposal’s value; an unsold banana would be the equivalent of a joke that didn’t land.

Previous works by Cattelan that required even less effort than Comedian include his first-ever gallery show in 1989, where he hung the sign ‘Be Right Back’ over the door and never returned; Another Fucking Readymade (1996), in which all the art was stolen from another artist; and Working is a Bad Job (1993), the sale of his Venice Biennale spot to a perfume company for ad space. This is a grifter’s minimalism, making the most of the absolute least, an ethos that equally describes his succinct formal approach. Works like Comedian have a deceptive simplicity grounded in the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual precision – the extreme paring of sculpture down to two materials and a single gesture, with exacting instructions for the height and angle of the tape. In contrast to a work like Orange and Banana (2000), the piece that artist Joe Morford unsuccessfully sued Cattelan for copying, Comedian bears a visual clarity that facilitated its rapid dissemination across the Internet. After all, razor-sharp brevity is the key to comedic timing; nothing destroys a joke more than a protracted setup or laboured punchline.

Comedian is many things: a sculpture, a meme and an international event. At Sotheby’s, dramatic lighting made it look a bit like a postmodern Catholic icon – abstracting Jesus Christ into a banana sounds exactly like something Cattelan would do. To truly appreciate the humour, though, I would think of it less as a discrete object than as Cattelan’s real-life parody of the art world where we unwittingly play ourselves. Transcending the status of art and arriving at the more absurd and elusive terrain of fame, the work has become the subject of a thousand think pieces, copycats and selfies by hordes of rabid fans seeking a celebrity encounter with a piece of fruit. Comedian is not simply a strip of duct tape and a banana but also the collective hysteria it generates. How do you measure art beyond its power to move the audience anyway?

_{Main image: A visitor looks at Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) during the press preview at Sotheby’s, New York, on October 25, 2024. Courtesy and photo: ^{Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images}}