This Shit is Banana

Sixteen and a half million bananas. Sixty-seven thousand, six hundred and three rolls of duct tape.

At thirty-five cents per banana, a banana per week, and the tack to stick your produce to the wall (give or take the inevitable inflation which I refuse to calculate) it will take 322,051 years to buy the amount of bananas and tape equivalent to the price which Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) sold for this past week. (If the Cavendish banana survives for that long). “Luckily, they’re not too pricey,” Sotheby’s told me.

MAJOR SALE DON'T MISS OUT ON THESE GREAT PRICES

MAJOR SALE DON'T MISS OUT ON THESE GREAT PRICES

*the Audacity will be up for auction in 2025, available only to those willing to exchange their virtue signals for blatant wanton statements about people you don’t know and may never meet

That’s not how art works, of course. We don’t buy paintings for the cost of the oil and canvas, but rather for their cultural value, moving emotional meaning, or ability to match with the living room couch.

Maurizio Cattelan, artworld prankster and provocateur, aims to critique the existing systems in power like government and art world institutional norms. The work Comedian is meant to call out the exorbitant prices in upper echelon markets, questioning what passes as art and what do we value (both monetarily and by virtue, morally)?

The answer resounds with the auctioneer’s hammer: we value power, wealth, and unrestrained audacity*.

Comedian is not a unique work that one can possession, rather a limited edition series of three (plus two artist’s proofs) certificates of authenticity which give the owner the right to reproduce said sculpture— a banana taped to the wall.

I imagine the artist proofs, in their developmental stages, would look green and taste rather tart. (Cattelan’s year-long ideation process included bronze banana sculptures and other material representations, but he decided that a plain banana was the most provocative material to use. He was right.) 

The purchase of this work is equivalent to a real world NFT, which simply guarantees that your banana is the real banana. Just like digital non-fungible tokens, the imagery is very fungible–in the digital landscape through a screenshot or in physical form through a quick trip to the grocery store.

The buyer of Comedian, crypto king Justin Sun, was the prime target for such a work aligning with techno-feudalist concepts of ownership. “This is not just an artwork,” Sun said in a statement to Sotheby’s, “it represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community. I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history.”

For the hefty sum Sun paid in exchange for the rights to display, he didn’t receive one banana. Instead, he is burdened with a lifetime of grocery store trips and hours lost to finding fruits of the legally specified ripeness.

“Luckily, they’re not too pricey,” said Sotheby’s Assistant Vice President and Specialist of the Contemporary & The Now Auctions NY in a phone call inquiry.

WHY SO EXPENSIVE?

The main outcries against Comedian– why the hell is it so expensive and how dare they set such a price? Let’s assume the axiom that Comedian is art. Let’s save the discussion of whether it is good or bad for later. Maybe we even get a little spicy and call it good… what, no? Well it’s certainly got everyone talking, isn’t that the point? No? Never mind! I said later.

High prices in the art market, unattainable to anyone in the middle class and below, are a topic of discord across the board. It widens the gap between starving artists and established ones, and worse so the chasm formed between the general public and art at large.

When the a decorative item’s price exceeds the median national household income ($80,610 for two people), folks start to chafe. (The annual median wage for fine artists is $59,300.)

Appreciating a piece of art for its harmonious aesthetics, technical rigor, or ‘thought-provoking’ qualities quickly fades away when the price tag attached is just as much of a fantasy as the scene portrayed. It’s difficult to imagine the amount of money spent on things that cost 100 times your yearly earnings. So what justifies this cost?

Art’s value is determined by the willingness to hand over cash for it; the demand exists because there are people who will support these prices. At the moment, the art market and its buyers recognize this artwork and types like it to have a tangible demand (the sales record). Like the Neverland fairies, democracy, and the almighty dollar, if we all clap loud enough our collective belief keeps these things alive. 

Shells or beads or beaver skins are no longer legal tender, because they are not in demand. As they became superfluous, people stopped trading these objects and therefore there was no inherent necessity to possess them for purchase power in society. There is no desire, no demand, and as such no value.

When it comes to art, it’s worth nothing until it’s sold. Comedian has sold and the people have voted with their wallets that the banana is worth at least 6 million. Maybe it will be devalued when its desirability decreases, but for now that is the cost. 

Supposing that banana is rightfully worth at least $120,000, which it sold for five years ago, why then has it increased 50 times in value in such a short period of time? Other works by Maurizio (Him, Ostrich, and Daddy Daddy) have reached the millions range and the price is not out of step with what the market agrees is the worth of an idea to be. The going price of conceptual artworks in 2024 (like a particular set of string lights, which I have also griped about) also sold for millions.

Again, the outrage doesn’t stem from whether this is good or bad art. The banana was an extremely effective method of stripping bare the art market to show the bones holding up the system. In the same breath, the artwork became one of those structurally supportive elements, indistinguishable from the beast itself.

Something powerful and pernicious about this piece is that it cannot be destroyed.

It has been eaten by art fair visitors twice already and will rot away

over

and over

and over

again.

It gives a new meaning to single use and is the opposite of sustainable, but the idea itself is

indelible and contractual. 

We suspend our belief so much that money—pieces of paper, Disney Dollars, or Chuck E. Cheese tokens—has value because we all agree upon it and act accordingly. So has gone the way of crypto, seen in this purchase, which exclusively required it as payment. The banana is the same kind of delusion; we convince ourselves of its existence, agree upon it, and move forward with some sort of logical, sensible, and well educated conviction, acknowledging that the banana is real, it is forever; that the value of ‘ownership’ is now solely in the hands of one man, and that it makes perfect, explainable sense and that’s just how things go.

If all that is true, then what creates this demand? Aside from the art historical value which is advocated for by those who wish to elevate such a piece, when assessing the situation from all angles—that is, the socioeconomic, geopolitical, ontological circumstances—the only conclusion one can make is that…

art collectors really like to get cucked.

Either that or they qualify for major tax cuts by deducting art acquisitions as a business expense.

But who would do that?

I know of at least one man who explained it to me succinctly as he planned to do just that. The artwork only needs to be in one’s office space for a month or so for it to qualify as a business expense. Then you can ‘rotate’ the artwork out of the office collection and install the lovely piece in your home, on “temporary loan”. This is also done through some philanthropic art collections. 

I don’t know why people choose to share these things with me, but thanks for the insight, sir. It’ll cost you a band a month to keep my memory foggy about that little kernel of wisdom. But I suppose that’s how it works. If everyone benefits in the end, what’s the harm in letting it slip?

I’d like to be a fly on the wall at the IRS when a produce-themed deduction claim comes across their desk. Then again, fruit is good for you and therefore seems like a reasonable business expense. As Lucille Bluth put it, “I mean, it’s one banana. What could it cost? Ten dollars?:

THE CONNECTIVE TISSUE

Returning to the question of whether this is good or bad art, or historically significant, I will refer to the experts’ opinions on Comedian. The grift was elegantly woven from their perfectly produced, cheeky social media advertisements to the white tower, academic essays elocuted by young gallery assistants.

Descriptions of the auction lot include lofty phrases like “liberates art from the realm of the sacred to return it to the secular world”, “prescient masterpieces”, and “catalytic conceptual inquiry”(1). Language is a powerful tool. Obviously, it is how we communicate, but the employment of certain types of speech influences us to believe things we may not agree with if put in simple terms rather than crafted in those of authority and prestige.

Here, and in many art world instances so much so that it is a meme, language leverages the work to an unimpeachable status, whether or not it deserves the accolades. Carefully enunciated scholarly diction, a glaze of professionality, and practiced hand gestures are the hallmark of experience and qualification. They say ‘trust me”, “believe me”, “I know what I’m talking about”, and hopefully “you should buy this”. (I speak from experience.)

This is the armory donned by young graduates when they find themselves employed by a major institution dealing in unknowable amounts of cash after four years of them surviving on cup-o-noodles alone. At what point does a young art enthusiast transform from being trapped in the bullshit framework in order to preserve one’s dream job and into the bullshitter themselves? The instinct to keep your head down, tow the line, and repeat the jargon is natural for the sake of protecting one’s job, one’s dream, and one’s bank account. After all, you’re lucky to be working in your field. The starving artist is an ever-present cautionary tale.

Maybe not all see through the bullshit, but Comedian is meant to provide 20/20 vision for those viewing a lie. The banana certainly helps to see past the shiny veneer of a historically referential exhibition catalogue, but some resist the truth before them. When the lie is transparent and you can no longer deny what you are supporting through your labor, what do you do? 

Return to the facts, to your training. There must be something that could justify such a price. I spoke with Carly Gamson (Sotheby’s Assistant Vice President and Specialist of the Contemporary & The Now Auctions NY) prior to this sale, trying to find out more details about the banana’s ‘world tour preview.’ Her opinion of the work? She thinks (or at least said) it is a brilliant conceptual sculpture that has a “lineage of artists behind it” with the “precedence of artists like Duchamp”.

In a wise turn of words which betray neither admiration nor detestation of the actual ‘sculpture’, she noted that, “Catalan is successful in what he is trying to do in evidence of all the press attention. He is doing something provocative that makes people question art and gets them excited.”

I’m not sure if excited is the right word, but Gamson is “interested to see how art collectors and the public galvanize behind it” If anything, there is a galvanizing effect against the artwork, and surely Sotheby's must know that? The international infamy undoubtedly played a role in running up the price and with the major press attention it has received, presupposes that the slurry of articles will solidify Comedian’s place in the Dadaist, Pop-Art, Ready-Made lineage. Cattelan, you’re welcome, here’s one more feather in your provocateur hat ;)

Sotheby’s auctioneer, Oliver Barker, finalizing the sale of Comedian by Cattelan for $6.2 million

Pointing out his counter-cultural approach on their auction promo page, Sotheby’s said that “evoking and advancing the strategies of his predecessors with sardonic and subversive wit, Cattelan – in his greatest coup to date – single-handedly prompted the world to reconsider how we define art, and the value we seek in it. We may be in on Cattelan’s joke, but Comedian is anything but.”

“We may be in on Cattelan’s joke, but Comedian is anything but.”

If the joke is for how much money can you scam someone out of, then maybe they are in on the joke. But they are supposed to be the butt of the joke. Cattelan’s work critiques those in power, but he is embraced by them. He benefits by the very B.S. he is calling out—unless in this case, the artist retained no resale rights for the secondary market. If that was the case and Cattelan saw no percentage of the 6 million, the joke would unfortunately be on him. (*The artist declined to answer questions from Hellmouth at this time.)

How is this dichotomy to be balanced? After how many times can you say that you’re thumbing their nose at the ‘system’, which then throws cash at you for your efforts, can you still call yourself a disruptor? The system itself is disruptive. Or at least one face of it is; that fickle system which chooses when to put on a tie and wreck mayhem, flagrantly ignoring the rules said system enacted in the first place. It relishes corruption and evil ‘geniuses’ who treat us like shit to rub salt in the wound of how much they can get away with. They dare laugh in the faces of all who look on and wonder at which oligarch Sotheby’s has shaken hands with to wash 6 million dollars clean—not only in this transaction, but many others.

In this aspect, the banana speaks to both a populist crowd and the smug intellectuals who weave words into webs until they mean almost nothing at all.

I LIKE TO WATCH…

Cattelan’s statement through America (2016), a literal, fully functional gold toilet, is that he views this place as a shithole. Created in the first ‘dumpster fire year’, the country was captivated by a gold (or more orange) man, who was rumored to also own such a commode.  Instead of seeing a farce, 47% of the country was delighted by the bawdy, unapologetically despicable behavior. It appealed to our darker compulsions which were given a legitimate platform in the successive years. Memes, NFTs, and unqualified political leaders became the uplifted norm.

America, Maurizio Cattelan, 2016

What is this draw to put our faith in scams? In people who put no effort into hiding the evidence, but deny with their words?  Is it a bid on reckless joy? A bid on humor? Or something much darker?

Like the presence of memes as a salve to current events for which we have no control….the banana encapsulates our nihilistic attitudes and capitalist loyalties.

Over and over again the outcomes show: we don’t care. Let us rot away, slip into absurdity, and devolve into the bubbling primordial slime that we all crave.

In discussion of divestment in oil, slave labor, and the demands to repatriate artworks to their country of origin, should we not also be throwing cans of soup at this banana? Campbell’s soup cans are, of course,  iconic emblems of the pop art, ready-made world which historically sparked controversy and conversation about the nature of art.

Art like this (ready-mades, found objects, and conceptual art) held up to figural or abstract, where skill, time, studied balance of color and form are all elements that allow us to contemplate and nod at the potential net worth of such artistic dedication. The beauty distracts from the charade. The banana pulls away the curtain and lays bare the naked and ugly form of the market, writhing delightfully against its circuitous snake’s tail.

Or, as Jerry Saltz would describe it, “The typical and self-congratulatory in joke laugh-laugh of a mastabatory art world having intellectual climaxes at the sight of a once interesting work sold at auction for a lot of money.”

He pointed out in a reactionary post, that the sum of banana money could “process every rape kit languishing on police shelves, the whole thing feels pretty petty. Even obscene.”

But we don’t care. We love to see this anti-social use of ‘fuck-you’ money. It allows us to live our billionaire fantasies, which are delusionally held in hopes of a future reality. For most Americans, falling into the lower class is a far more likely outcome than finding themselves boosted to the upper crust by a lucky scratch off card.

So instead we live vicariously.

Anti-establishment is a favorite identity of Americans. We are both the outsider and the insider, we can benefit from both hyper-individualism and a uniform community from which no one falls out of line, we have freedom to be cowboys and not follow anyone’s rules but our own and we also adhere to the ever stricter government regulations on how we live our lives, from the doctor’s office to the bathrooms to the schools to our jobs.

With the deification of the ultra-wealthy, we bow at their feet hoping that as a reward for worship we might gain some of their attributes and get to be like them.

REFERENCES:

1. Sotheby’s The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction, Lot 10, 2024.

2. Morgan Meaker, Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism, Wired, Apr 9, 2024.

3. Louise Gray, The ‘pandemic’ destroying the world’s favourite fruit, BBC.

4. Gloria Guzman and Melissa Kollar, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-282, Income in the United States: 2023, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2024.

5. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics.

6. Cory Doctorow, Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar, Medium, Oct. 21, 2024.

7. Sotheby’s, The Banana That Broke the Internet: Maurizio Cattelan's 'Comedian' Heads to Auction, Nov, 2024.

8. Guggenheim, Maurizio Cattelan: “America”.