A piece of conceptual art consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million at an auction in New York on Wednesday.
“Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, was a phenomenon when it debuted in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, as festivalgoers tried to make out whether the single yellow piece of fruit affixed to a white wall with silver duct tape was a joke or cheeky commentary on questionable standards among art collectors. At one point another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it.
The piece attracted so much attention that it had to be withdrawn from view, but three editions sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, according to the gallery handling sales at the time.
Five years later, someone has now paid more than 40 times that higher price point at the Sotheby’s auction. Or, more accurately, they have purchased a certificate of authenticity that gives them the authority to duct-tape a banana to a wall and call it “Comedian.”
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Bidding started at $800,000 and within minutes shot up to $2 million, then $3 million, then $4 million, as the auctioneer joked, “It’s slipping through the auction room.” The final hammer price announced in the room was $5.2 million, which didn't include the about $1 million in auction house fees, paid by the buyer.
Sotheby’s calls Cattelan “among Contemporary Art’s most brilliant provocateurs.”
“He has persistently disrupted the art world’s status quo in meaningful, irreverent, and often controversial ways,” the auction house said in a description of “Comedian.”
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The sale came a day after a painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte sold for $121.2 million, a record for the artist, at a separate auction.
“The Empire of Light,” an eerie nighttime streetscape below a pale blue daytime sky, sold Tuesday as part of Christie’s sale of the collection of interior designer Mica Ertegun, who died last year at age 97.
The sale lifts Magritte into the ranks of artists whose works have gone for more than $100 million at auction. Magritte is the 16th member of the club, which also includes Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, according to the market analyst firm Artprice.
“The Empire of Light,” executed in 1954, was one of 17 versions of the same scene that Magritte painted in oil. Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, called the sale “a historic moment in our saleroom.”
The $121.2 million price included the auction house’s fees. The buyer was a telephone bidder whose identity was not disclosed.
