Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” is up for auction. The estimated retail price ranges from $1 million to $1.5 million.
According to CNN, Cattelan’s new work “The Comedian” will find a new owner at an auction to be held at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York on Sept. 20. The estimated retail price is estimated to range from 1 million U.S. dollars to 1.5 million dollars.
The painting, which Cattelan first presented at an art fair in Miami in 2019, is an installation art in which a banana is duct-taped to the wall. In total, the work was made up of three pieces, two of which were sold to private collectors for $120,000 each, making headlines. The remaining one was kept secret but sold at a higher price.
It was one of these three items that was auctioned this time, and it was not known who the seller was.
The buyer will receive a roll of duct tape, a banana, an authentic certificate, and an official guide for installation. Sotheby’s told CNN that the tapes and bananas the buyer will receive are all different from what were initially displayed.
The value of this work, which introduced ordinary bananas as works of art, has been debated in the world. Some critics say the work follows a tradition of conceptual art that extends from Marcel Duchamp’s work “Sam,” which exhibited urinary tract in art galleries in the past.
To see this “problem work,” visitors flocked to the Miami Art Fair in 2019 like clouds, and the work became a hot topic again when an American performance artist took off a banana attached to the wall in front of hundreds of visitors. The artist who ate the banana claimed at the time that the action was a separate act of art and not a vandalism.
The painting was later exhibited at Maurizio’s private exhibition held at the Lium Museum in Seoul last year, and it became a hot topic at home and abroad when a university student ate a banana on the wall. The museum later replaced the banana with a new one.
JULIE KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
