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4 days ago
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A BANANA duct-taped to a wall is being sold for $1million at an art auction – and you don’t even get to keep the banana.
Instead, the price grants you permission to recreate the “profound” piece, but a banana only costs 16p at your local Tesco.
AP
AFPThe bizarre artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan is titled “Comedian”.
Now, the minimalist object has an estimated value of between £792,000 and £1,187,000 ($1 million and $1.5 million) at Sotheby’s auction in New York.
Despite the obscene cost, the “Comedian” is being labelled as game-changing for the contemporary art world.
Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, said: “What Cattelan is really doing is turning a mirror to the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking thought about how we ascribe value to artworks, what we define as an artwork.
“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan.
“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled”.
It seems, however, that the “Comedian” might be intended as a joke poking fun at rich people.
Cattelan is often thought of as a “trickster artist” according to Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
She said: “But his work is often at the intersection of the sort of humor and the deeply macabre.
“He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”
Chloé went onto speculate that the bemusing banana is actually a commentary on imperialism and labour exploitation.
She continued: “It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana.
“[It’s] at least a more useful tool or it’s at least an additional sort of place to go in terms of the questions that this work could be asking.
“It’s not that interesting of an idea.”
It is worth keeping in mind that the “Comedian” was bound to get a lot of social media attention, alluding to it being a dare, Chloé further suggested.
The auction takes place on November 20.
The “Comedian” was first debuted in 2019, and quickly became a sensation.
The artwork has inspired Halloween costumes, tattoos and movie spoofs.
On the banana’s official Instagram page, people can be seen dressing up as the artwork and creating a Lego replica.
The “Comedian” can also been seen in pictures spoofing the unknown grey block in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and someone has even gotten a tattoo of it on their arm.
One comment under the account’s first post back in 2019 reads: “This art could have been funny if it had not been art”.
AP
AFP
English (US)