Back-to-back typhoons are ripping through villages, humanitarian crises are raging, and New York City is so dry it’s burning — however tonight, November 20, within the cocooned bubble of a Sotheby’s salesroom on the Upper East Side, a banana has simply bought for $6.2 million.
This was not simply any banana, after all, however relatively one chosen for artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019), his notoriously sparse art work that includes the yellow fruit duct-taped to a white wall. But very similar to our hopes and desires, this banana will finally rot, and it must be switched out with a contemporary one (“the banana and duct tape can be replaced as needed,” a Sotheby’s consultant defined). And at that time, it actually will simply be any banana — with its tender and mushy inside, its inevitable patch of brown spots, and its loaded legacy of colonialism and exploitation.
Dutifully, I inquired a few press ticket to attend the sale and witness the pageantry within the flesh. A Sotheby’s spokesperson politely declined resulting from “capacity constraints,” and as a comfort, she provided to ship a bottle of Sotheby’s signature champagne to take pleasure in as I “experience the auction from the comfort of home.” The psychological picture of me popping the cork of my public sale house-branded bubbly from my sofa on a Wednesday evening whereas streaming the sale on my growing old MacBook was so hilariously anticlimactic that I briefly thought-about dwell running a blog it à la Drunk History.
In the top, although, I made a decision the factor simply wasn’t going to be that thrilling, and I used to be largely proper. Lot 10, Cattelan’s “Comedian” got here up round 7:26pm, smack dab between certainly one of Richard Prince’s Nurse work and a 1970s Suzanne Jackson canvas so painfully stunning it added insult to harm. Following auctioneer Oliver Barker’s nervous introduction (“Not quite sure what to expect here”), a rhythmic volley ensued between a number of bidders on the telephones, a paddle within the room, and an formidable on-line bidder. Six minutes later, the hammer lastly plopped down at $5.2 million ($6,240,000, with the home’s charges) due to a telephone bidder with Jen Hua, head of Sotheby’s China. The purchaser, it was introduced in an e mail blast shortly thereafter, was Chinese collector Justin Sun, proprietor of BitCurrent and founding father of the crypto platform Tron. It’s not stunning contemplating that this was the one lot within the sale eligible for fee in cryptocurrencies and that two cash impressed by Cattelan’s work — the Solana-based “Banana Tape Wall” ($BTW) and a token known as $BAN started by a Sotheby’s employee — are in 1000’s of digital “wallets.” That data, and the truth that Sun as soon as paid nearly as much for a chance to have lunch with Warren Buffet, ought to inform you all it’s essential know concerning the bro vitality surrounding this public sale.
Sun stated within the e mail blast that he plans to “personally eat the banana” within the coming days as “part of this unique artistic experience.”
“Comedian” made its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, the place Perrotin Gallery reportedly bought three editions of the work for between $120,000 and $150,000 every; certainly one of these was later donated to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The version that went underneath the hammer tonight was the second within the collection, which additionally contains two artist’s proofs. A provenance part underneath the lot description on Sotheby’s web site notes that the work modified palms thrice: first when it was initially bought by a non-public collector on the honest, then when it was acquired by the worldwide gallery White Cube, and as soon as extra when it was purchased by its most up-to-date proprietor earlier than this sale. That’s proper: Over a interval of 5 years, three patrons paid what I can solely assume have been mounting costs for the rights to tape a banana to a wall and name it Art, and every of them in the end determined that they didn’t need it. (White Cube has not but responded to a request for remark.)
But each banana has its day, and the PR machine has largely efficiently albeit shamelessly couched “Comedian” in a lineage of irreverent conceptualism that Sotheby’s catalog essay traces again to Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) and Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917). The work “sits firmly at the head of an art historical hall of infamy alongside the renegade minds who made controversy, jest, and ideological rupture part of the fabric of contemporary art,” the essay reads, seemingly utilizing as many phrases as attainable and not using a trace of perceptible irony. One would possibly as an alternative supply commentary right here on the banana’s standing as one of many world’s most vital crops, as a logo of United Fruit Company’s disastrous insurance policies in Central America, and as a permanent illustration of ongoing labor violations, as explored in initiatives like Blanca Serrano and Juanita Solano’s 2022 digital exhibition La Fiebre del Banano / Banana Craze.
But what if “Comedian” is what all of us deep down realize it to be — a solipsistic assertion, an overpriced fruit, a nasty art work that doesn’t even rise to the satisfying punch of a gimmick? Much like poorly executed art-world satire that secretly relishes in what it purports to critique, Cattelan’s piece isn’t holding up a mirror to something. Sun, tonight high’s bidder, didn’t purchase “a part of history,” as he stated in a press release — he purchased a banana and a roll of tape.
