The $6.2 Million Banana, Explained

In November 2019, Perrotin gallery announced that Maurizio Cattelan, the art world’s reigning prankster-provocateur, had made his first modern work for an art fair in 15 years. It was called Comedian.

“Maurizio Cattelan is known for hyperrealistic sculptures that lampoon popular culture and offer a wry commentary on society, power, and authority,” the gallery said in a press release that went largely unnoticed at first. “Comprised of a real banana affixed to the wall with a piece of gray Scotch tape, this new work is no different. In the same vein as Cattelan’s America (2016), this piece offers insight into how we assign worth and what kind of objects we value.”

The statement explained that Cattelan spent a year trying to make a sculpture of a banana. He tried resin, then bronze, then painted bronze, before “finally coming back to the initial idea of a real banana.”

When Emmanuel Perrotin’s gallery first taped a banana to the wall of its booth at Art Basel Miami Beach on December 4 of that year (actually using duct tape, for the record), it was an immediate sensation among those at the First Choice preview. Comedian became the most Instragrammed work at the world’s most Instagrammable art fair as two editions quickly sold for $120,000 before Perrotin reportedly texted the artist and asked if he could up the price to $150,000. There was also immediate outrage that someone could just…tape a banana to a wall, call it art, and sell it for six figures. Somebody came up and ate the banana at the fair, in protest. (The gallery just replaced it. The certificate accompanying the work says that the banana can be replaced at any point, and they had a backup banana.)

And then the New York Post put the work on its cover, ensuring its immortality. “Bananas! Art world gone mad,” read the wood.

Five years later that $150,000 price now seems downright modest. On Wednesday night at Sotheby’s in New York, seven bidders chased Comedian well past its $1.5 million high estimate, until a client on the phone with Sotheby’s deputy Asia chair Jen Hua offered a bid of $5.2 million, which came to $6.2 million in fees, shocking the packed salesroom.

How did we get here, to a point where a 35-cent banana taped to a wall sells for the price of the most steep house in Cleveland?

Let’s take a step back. When I first got the Perrotin preview for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 and saw Comedian, it struck me as an archetypal work by the artist, a very high-level Cattelan. And the price of $120,000 seemed kind of…reasonable? Maybe even a bargain?

Cattelan’s auction record is $17.2 million—that would be for a statue called Him, which is a petite Hitler—and several of his pre-Comedian ready-mades have sold in the seven figures. Daddy Daddy, a Pinocchio toy lying face down in a pool of water, sold for $1.2 million. Ostrich, which is just a taxidermy ostrich, sold for 1.5 million British pounds. This is a modern artwork by an artist who semiretired after his Guggenheim retrospective in 2011, and it’s a particularly striking one: The juxtaposition of the industrial gray duct tape and the ripening tender yellow flesh of the banana is super punk rock, and kind of unforgettable. It nods to one of my personal favorite Cattelan works: A Perfect Day, in which he duct-taped his dealer, Massimo De Carlo, to the wall of his gallery and kept him aloft the entire day of the opening.