A recreation of The Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan
Recently, a museum visitor made headlines when they ate a $6 million work of art. The Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan is the official title of the piece of concept art most people simply know as “the thing of the banana stuck to the wall with silver duct tape”. The work was on display at France’s Centre Pompidou-Metz when, on July 12th, a visitor went up and ate the banana. The museum quickly replaced the banana, having a supply of the fruit on hand, as Cattelan’s instructions included replacing the banana occasionally throughout its exhibition. This is far from the first time The Comedian has been eaten. When the work was displayed for the first time at Art Basel Miami in 2019, a performance artist named David Datuna took the banana off the wall and ate it in front of fair-goers. In 2023, a visitor to the Leeum Museum in Seoul, South Korea, did the same. And, perhaps most famously, the Chinese crypto figure Justin Sun bought a version of The Comedian for over $6 million at Sotheby’s, New York, before filming himself eating it.
Whenever The Comedian comes up in the news, all sorts of people will try to revive the horse they beat to death a long time ago in talking about the work’s meaning and the surrounding controversy. What does this mean for art? If you like it, does that make you pretentious? What is Cattelan saying about the market? Is connoisseurship dead? These are good questions, ones worth asking. But to a degree, they overcomplicate things. According to the Pompidou-Metz’s accompanying description, The Comedian is a commentary on the “absurdity of financial speculation and the fragility of knowledge systems that underpin the art market”. But to me, Cattelan’s Comedian is first and foremost a statement about the nature of art itself, and it serves as the perfect starting point for a conversation on the subject.
Among the many utterances that the casual museum-goer or gallery visitor might say that would make a connoisseur’s blood boil is “I don’t get it.” And that brings me to my preferred analogy about art appreciation: art is a two-way street. However, many view it as a one-way street, where an artist creates a work that conforms to seemingly objective aesthetic laws. An audience agrees or disagrees whether the work is indeed aesthetically pleasing, and that’s the end of it. However, art is so much more than that. It’s a two-way street, requiring some actual effort on the part of the viewer. If it were otherwise, a work of art would serve no more purpose than a nice pattern on wallpaper. Rather, a work of art is a text. It’s a document that needs to be analyzed, dissected, and interpreted, all of which leads to a person formulating their own opinion about it. But some people don’t see the need to put in that effort. They will stand in front of a painting by Rothko or Frankenthaler, dismissing it with an “Okay, so what? I don’t get it. I could do that.”
Nothing? It doesn’t do anything for you? You don’t want to do any work whatsoever? It doesn’t make you feel anything? It doesn’t evoke a memory or an image or any other sensory experience you may have had in the past? Dismissing a work of art by saying “I could do that” does a disservice to the artist. It reduces art to the physical, mechanical motions of creating something, completely divorcing art from the creative process that occurs in the mind. Anytime I hear someone say, “I could do that”, my standard response is always, “Okay, but did you?” That always confuses them, because they might have to admit that no, they didn’t, and they likely never would have been able to create something like this had they not just seen it now.
Cattelan’s Comedian is the perfect case study for these questions and discussions. The people who are the loudest in their dismissal, ridicule, and mockery are actually undermining their own point. Creating something aesthetically pleasing that serves as a strict recreation of nature is not the be-all and end-all of art. Art’s purpose is to provoke a response. The purpose of art is to make you think. And it doesn’t all have to be positive. A work of art doesn’t have to make you feel good. Saying otherwise is the equivalent of disliking a book because it doesn’t have a happy ending, or refusing to give a musician any credit because they make use of discord. The fact that you’re feeling anything at all about it means that it’s done its job. The British actor Simon Pegg recently shared how he showed his teenage daughter the David Lynch film Blue Velvet for the first time, and that he was thrilled when she thoroughly disliked it. “I was delighted that Tilly hated it because she talked about it nonstop that night and then the next day. And I said, sometimes entertainment is an overrated function of art.” When Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall in Miami years ago, he was not necessarily doing anything new or innovative. He was following in the footsteps of Dada and pop art, reinforcing a century-old idea: it’s art because we say it is. What more do we need than that?
“I Could Do That”: Cattelan’s Banana & the Nature of Art
A recreation of The Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan
Recently, a museum visitor made headlines when they ate a $6 million work of art. The Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan is the official title of the piece of concept art most people simply know as “the thing of the banana stuck to the wall with silver duct tape”. The work was on display at France’s Centre Pompidou-Metz when, on July 12th, a visitor went up and ate the banana. The museum quickly replaced the banana, having a supply of the fruit on hand, as Cattelan’s instructions included replacing the banana occasionally throughout its exhibition. This is far from the first time The Comedian has been eaten. When the work was displayed for the first time at Art Basel Miami in 2019, a performance artist named David Datuna took the banana off the wall and ate it in front of fair-goers. In 2023, a visitor to the Leeum Museum in Seoul, South Korea, did the same. And, perhaps most famously, the Chinese crypto figure Justin Sun bought a version of The Comedian for over $6 million at Sotheby’s, New York, before filming himself eating it.
Whenever The Comedian comes up in the news, all sorts of people will try to revive the horse they beat to death a long time ago in talking about the work’s meaning and the surrounding controversy. What does this mean for art? If you like it, does that make you pretentious? What is Cattelan saying about the market? Is connoisseurship dead? These are good questions, ones worth asking. But to a degree, they overcomplicate things. According to the Pompidou-Metz’s accompanying description, The Comedian is a commentary on the “absurdity of financial speculation and the fragility of knowledge systems that underpin the art market”. But to me, Cattelan’s Comedian is first and foremost a statement about the nature of art itself, and it serves as the perfect starting point for a conversation on the subject.
Among the many utterances that the casual museum-goer or gallery visitor might say that would make a connoisseur’s blood boil is “I don’t get it.” And that brings me to my preferred analogy about art appreciation: art is a two-way street. However, many view it as a one-way street, where an artist creates a work that conforms to seemingly objective aesthetic laws. An audience agrees or disagrees whether the work is indeed aesthetically pleasing, and that’s the end of it. However, art is so much more than that. It’s a two-way street, requiring some actual effort on the part of the viewer. If it were otherwise, a work of art would serve no more purpose than a nice pattern on wallpaper. Rather, a work of art is a text. It’s a document that needs to be analyzed, dissected, and interpreted, all of which leads to a person formulating their own opinion about it. But some people don’t see the need to put in that effort. They will stand in front of a painting by Rothko or Frankenthaler, dismissing it with an “Okay, so what? I don’t get it. I could do that.”
Nothing? It doesn’t do anything for you? You don’t want to do any work whatsoever? It doesn’t make you feel anything? It doesn’t evoke a memory or an image or any other sensory experience you may have had in the past? Dismissing a work of art by saying “I could do that” does a disservice to the artist. It reduces art to the physical, mechanical motions of creating something, completely divorcing art from the creative process that occurs in the mind. Anytime I hear someone say, “I could do that”, my standard response is always, “Okay, but did you?” That always confuses them, because they might have to admit that no, they didn’t, and they likely never would have been able to create something like this had they not just seen it now.
Cattelan’s Comedian is the perfect case study for these questions and discussions. The people who are the loudest in their dismissal, ridicule, and mockery are actually undermining their own point. Creating something aesthetically pleasing that serves as a strict recreation of nature is not the be-all and end-all of art. Art’s purpose is to provoke a response. The purpose of art is to make you think. And it doesn’t all have to be positive. A work of art doesn’t have to make you feel good. Saying otherwise is the equivalent of disliking a book because it doesn’t have a happy ending, or refusing to give a musician any credit because they make use of discord. The fact that you’re feeling anything at all about it means that it’s done its job. The British actor Simon Pegg recently shared how he showed his teenage daughter the David Lynch film Blue Velvet for the first time, and that he was thrilled when she thoroughly disliked it. “I was delighted that Tilly hated it because she talked about it nonstop that night and then the next day. And I said, sometimes entertainment is an overrated function of art.” When Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall in Miami years ago, he was not necessarily doing anything new or innovative. He was following in the footsteps of Dada and pop art, reinforcing a century-old idea: it’s art because we say it is. What more do we need than that?