Back-to-back typhoons are ripping through villages, humanitarian crises are raging, and New York City is so dry it’s burning — but tonight, November 20, in the cocooned bubble of a Sotheby’s salesroom on the Upper East Side, a banana has just sold for $6.2 million.
This was not just any banana, of course, but rather one selected for artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019), his notoriously sparse artwork featuring the yellow fruit duct-taped to a white wall. But much like our hopes and dreams, this banana will eventually rot, and it will have to be switched out with a fresh one (“the banana and duct tape can be replaced as needed,” a Sotheby’s representative explained). And at that point, it really will just be any banana — with its soft and mushy interior, its inevitable patch of brown spots, and its loaded legacy of colonialism and exploitation.
Dutifully, I inquired about a press ticket to attend the sale and witness the pageantry in the flesh. A Sotheby’s spokesperson politely declined due to “capacity constraints,” and as a consolation, she offered to deliver a bottle of Sotheby’s signature champagne to enjoy as I “experience the auction from the comfort of home.” The mental image of me popping the cork of my auction house-branded bubbly from my couch on a Wednesday night while streaming the sale on my aging MacBook was so hilariously anticlimactic that I briefly considered live blogging it à la Drunk History.
In the end, though, I decided the thing just wasn’t going to be that exciting, and I was mostly right. Lot 10, Cattelan’s “Comedian” came up around 7:26pm, smack dab between one of Richard Prince’s Nurse paintings and a 1970s Suzanne Jackson canvas so painfully beautiful it added insult to injury. Following auctioneer Oliver Barker’s nervous introduction (“Not quite sure what to expect here”), a rhythmic volley ensued between several bidders on the phones, a paddle in the room, and an ambitious online bidder. Six minutes later, the hammer finally plopped down at $5.2 million ($6,240,000, with the house’s fees) thanks to a phone bidder with Jen Hua, head of Sotheby’s China. It was the only work in the sale eligible for payment in cryptocurrencies, and two coins inspired by the work — the Solana-based “Banana Tape Wall” ($BTW) and a token called $BAN started by a Sotheby’s employee — are in thousands of digital “wallets,” which should tell you all you need to know about the bro energy surrounding this auction.
“Comedian” made its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, where Perrotin Gallery reportedly sold three editions of the work for between $120,000 and $150,000 each; one of these was later donated to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The edition that went under the hammer tonight was the second in the series, which also includes two artist’s proofs. A provenance section under the lot description on Sotheby’s website notes that the work changed hands three times: first when it was initially purchased by a private collector at the fair, then when it was acquired by the international gallery White Cube, and once more when it was bought by its most recent owner before this sale. That’s right: Over a period of five years, three buyers paid what I can only assume were mounting prices for the rights to tape a banana to a wall and call it Art, and each of them ultimately decided that they didn’t want it. (White Cube has not yet responded to a request for comment.)
But every banana has its day, and the PR machine has mostly successfully albeit shamelessly couched “Comedian” in a lineage of irreverent conceptualism that Sotheby’s catalog essay traces back 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 using as many words as possible without a hint of perceptible irony. One might instead offer commentary here on the banana’s status as one of the world’s most significant crops, as a symbol of United Fruit Company’s disastrous policies in Central America, and as an enduring representation of ongoing labor violations, as explored in projects like Blanca Serrano and Juanita Solano’s 2022 digital exhibition La Fiebre del Banano / Banana Craze.
But what if “Comedian” is what we all deep down know it to be — a solipsistic statement, an overpriced fruit, a bad artwork 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 anything. Tonight’s top bidder didn’t acquire a piece of history — they bought a banana and a roll of tape, and they should know better.
