Both the punchline and the set-up, Cattelan has us questioning: who’s the comedian now? writes Ruby Mitchell.
Photography courtesy of Noh Huyn-soo
In 1837, Hans Christian Anderson published The Emperor’s New Clothes, a fairytale of vanity, delusion and the nakedness of power. In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall and called it Comedian, serving the art world its contemporary equivalent. Fast-forward to 2024, and Comedian - or rather, its conceptual certificate - was sold at Sotheby’s for an eye-watering $6.24 million, after buyer’s fees. Incendiary at its core, the sale was bound to stir up an already divisive discourse, but one wonders: has the art world been dressed down, or have we fully embraced the role of Anderson’s Emperor, parading our metaphoric nudity through the sanctified halls of the auction house?
Comedian’s catalogue note is punctured with hyper-intellectual jargon and endless erudite accolades, essentially functioning as intellectual scaffolding. Likened to the “Duchampian readymade”, a “genesis of a larger ontological schism”, Sotheby’s describe Cattelan as “the dialectical antipode to the trope of genius creator”. Even (or perhaps, especially) as someone who works in the art world, reading statements like these can be painful - artwork reduced to an abstract series of conceptual signifiers. It’s not hard to see how art ‘outsiders’ are convinced the market is a place of absurdity.
Photography courtesy of Sotheby's
Matthew Slotover, co-founder of London’s Frieze art fair and proclaimed fan of Comedian, deems Cattelan’s work a “provocation”. He says: “It’s a very basic, valueless object. And its attachment to the wall couldn’t be more simple and un-artistic. It’s an absurd thing to do and absurd that people would pay money for it, but that is very much a part of the work”. This absurdity is encapsulated not by the banana itself, but by what Sotheby’s has actually sold: the ‘certificate of authenticity’, a waiflike permission slip allowing its owner to recreate the work ad infinitum. No longer a banana, Cattelan’s work has mutated into a hyper-capitalist ouroboros - rotting, replaced, rotting again - its value lodged firmly in the hyper-intangible.
Comedian does not feel radically “Duchampian” to me. What it now stands for feels like the readymade’s overripe offspring, updated for a world in which conceptual art has been fully subsumed by the capitalist machine it once sought to critique. The very institutions Cattelan seeks to satirise - auction houses, elite collectors, and viral hype - have bastardised satire to status.
This has, to an extent, been done before: in 1961, Piero Manzoni filled 90 tin cans with his own faeces (though the validity of this has been questioned). Enrico Baj, a friend of Manzoni, described this as “an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism”. No can has ever been fully opened, and many are unsure the lengths to which Manzoni went to belittle the art world - so we’re faced with a Schrödinger’s Shit conundrum. Originally valued according to their weight in gold, their subsequent prices at auction were astronomical: Sotheby’s have auctioned two cans, one selling for £103,000 in 2007, the other for £97,250 in 2008. In 2015, Christies went on to sell Tin 54 for £182,500, and a year later a tin was sold in Milan for a record £229,250.
Andy Warhol summed up Manzoni's ethos up quite succinctly: “Art is what you can get away with”. It’s like Warhol’s banana, originally emblazoned on the cover of The Velvet Underground's 1967 debut album, went to art school, got an MA in Art Business, and came back to haunt us. Cattelan invites us to laugh, but only if we can afford the ticket. He has become complicit in the absurdities of commerce. If art is what you can get away with, Comedian proves you can get away with a lot.
Justin Sun, the “proud owner” of Comedian, is a Chinese collector and crypto investor. He plans to eat the banana as a way of “honouring its place in both art history and popular culture”. He noted: “When I first heard about this work back in 2019, I thought it was pure genius. And when I heard it was back on the market, I knew I had to have it. Cattelan’s humour and sense of adventure strike a strong chord with me.”
Sotheby's Now and Contemporary Sale results. Data courtesy of Pi-Ex.
A contemporary case-study of Marx’s commodity fetishism, Sun has bought squarely into the artifice of luxury. Comedian’s value is no longer tethered to its materiality, nor to the labour that produced it, but instead tied to the abstracted cultural and economic systems that surround it. For an absurdly poetic moment, Sotheby’s has symbolically weaponised the artwork by incorporating the taped banana into its logo as a branding tool, shifting Comedian even further down the critique-to-commodity spectrum. Sotheby’s saw a 63% fall in total hammer price for Now and Contemporary sales overall - plunging from $256 million in 2023 to $95 million this year. In a historic low for contemporary evening Marquee sales, one has to question the health of the art market. Comedian’s carnivalesque hype seems to have successfully drowned this out.
In Anderson’s prophetic tale, it takes a child to call out the Emperor’s nakedness. If we, the audience, are not that child’s voice, we can only be the Emperor’s courtiers. Cattelan may be laughing, but the joke, as always, is on us.
Ruby Mitchell is a London-based art writer and historian.
