It's One Banana. What could it cost?
Un-peeling Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian."
“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost—ten dollars?”—deep thoughts from the bard of our times, Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth.
I was working in a booth at Art Basel | Miami Beach in 2019 when, just down the aisle, the artist Maurizio Cattelan presented Comedian: an artwork consisting of a single banana duct-taped to a wall—an edition of three, priced at $125,000 each. The bananas sold; the press delighted in the provocation; and the public rose in warm-hearted outrage. “All this for a banana?!”
You know the story by now, because the number isn’t the whimsical $125,000 of 2019, but post-inflation $6.2M of 2024, and that kind of provocation gets all the national media outlets to huddle up for a news cycle. Cattelan told The New York Times in one of its dozen stories on the incident that:
“The auction has turned what began as a statement in Basel into an even more absurd global spectacle . . . In that way, the work becomes self-reflexive: The higher the price, the more it reinforces its original concept.”1
The news cycle is brief, but Comedian grabbed a few more over the sleepy holiday weekend when the cryptocurrency billionaire who bought the six-million-dollar banana announced his own provocation: that he would buy a hundred-thousand more bananas from the fruit vendor that sold the original one—for 35 cents each! Hashtag wow!2
Cattelan is a serious and occasionally profound artist, and Comedian is a worthy and valuable object—but what is the concept exactly? It’s a provocation, sure—but have you toured the carpet-lined aisles of Art Basel | Miami Beach? Have you been to a public collection of modern and contemporary art any time in, oh, I don’t know, the last century? You can’t avoid provocations about the limits of art—and Comedian is a paler shade of yellow than Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Everyone mentions Duchamp in reference to Cattelan, but the most important bit about the Duchamp’s Fountain, for our purposes, is the date: 1917. How are out mouths still agape after a full century of this? And what “concept” could Cattelan’s banana possibly add to that hoary legacy—something that hasn’t already been rendered more audaciously by Damien Hirst or more scatological by Piero Manzoni3?
If the banana is the comedian, what’s the joke? And at whose expense?
II. This Shit is Bananas.
Here’s the joke: attendance is up at art fairs, immersive experiences, and museums around the world. Admission price is up, too, so it’s easy to calculate that we, as a species, are paying far more money and far more attention to fine art than ever before. What are we getting for that massive outlay?
Not art. This is not a harangue about Cattelan or Hirst or Cecily Brown not being “real artists”—I like all of them just fine—this is an observation that the early twenty-first century marks an historic reversal of fortunes. For most of human history, private collecting was a net gain for the art-viewing public: collector-patrons spent most of the money and the valuable objects found their way to public museums. That has changed: now the bottom 99% spends a lot more money and retains less of the value.
The art market today is big, but the most active tranche of the collecting class is roughly the same size it’s always been. If we’re going to art events in record numbers but engaged in the art market in shrinking fractions, what are we doing at Art Basel | Miami Beach?
I’ll put it in terms of bananas since that seems to be the only thing we understand. The sale of art is about seventy-five billion dollars globally per year—about half as big as the world banana market. That $75B is distributed with extreme inequality. (In 2019, most of one of those 75 billions was spent on a single painting—and none of that went to the artist.) If most of those bananas are going home with the 2,500 billionaires in the world, then we are, in a larger percentage than ever in human history, paying to watch those billionaires eat their bananas.
This is make-believe on all of our parts: the art, the market, the press, and the outrage. We’re playing at mock-disgust because this is what popular engagement with the artworld is: we press our noses up against the glass and goggle at the consumption habits of the ultra-rich. Cattelan’s deployment of a perishable fruit baited the trap, and the crypto-currency billionaire collector perfected it when he announced that he would eat the banana4—but we’re the ones inside. The Times checked in with the fruit seller on the inequality of the transaction—from 25 cents to six million dollars, hashtag wow!—but the scandal isn’t the mark-up on bananas. None of us think that this is how the ultra-rich buy their bananas, right?
We flock to Art Basel | Miami Beach, we scoop up news about crypto-currency billionaires like grouperfish, we plunk down our admission fees, not so we can take home a nice picture, but so that we can play-act as robber barons, browsing the stalls right along with the crypto-currency billionaires on the vast level playing field that is the Miami Beach Convention Center. And from that circumspect vantage point, “All that for a banana!” rolls right off the tongue. “How foolish!” We get to pretend to be shrewd, skeptical, and discerning.
III. The Banana Split.
Joke’s on us, my friend. We are spending billions on art, only we’re not taking any home—what’s so shrewd about that? The only gracious thing is to learn to laugh along with the comedian.
The question we should be asking is not “All that for one banana?!”—it is: What do we want our artworld to look like? Is it a jpg of a collection of AI-generated Chester Cheetah? Is it the rental fee on a subterranean storage locker, or a partial share of a portfolio of masterpieces? Do we wish to be spectators, weekend warriors, let’s-pretend robber barons? The boundary of the artworld is always up for renegotiation and we are, whether we realize it or not, all its citizens.
It’s one banana—what could it possibly cost?
Exhibitions of Note.
From December 9 2024 through May 1, 2025, the Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach will present thirty photographs from Paul Shore’s collaboration with Nicole Root, Licked Sucked Stacked Stuck: A Confectionery History of Contemporary Sculpture. Reservations are required—contact bunker@brdart.com, or drop me a line for more information.
“Collector Offers to Buy 100,000 More Bananas,” The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2024.
Manzoni for the win, in 1961: “I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit, that is really his.”