Five years ago, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan took the art world for a ride when he unveiled his piece, “Comedian.” The name of the piece is very much self-aware considering the art itself is just a banana duct taped to a wall. It’s concept art, in the way that John Cage‘s silent musical composition “4’33″” is a song. It’s the idea that is the art, not so much the actual aesthetic. Either way, a crypto investor just bought that banana and duct tape at auction for $6 million.
To be completely fair, there are three editions of “Comedian” which are certificates of authenticity that come with instructions about how to display the piece. That is to say, Justin Sun just paid multiple millions of dollars for a certificate that describes how to duct tape a banana to a wall. This ties back into the conceptual idea that the actual banana and actual duct tape are not the art itself. You could attach a banana to your wall with duct tape, but without the certificate that goes along with it, you don’t actually own one of the three editions of “Comedian.”
“This is not just an artwork,” Sun said. “It represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.” In a sense, he’s right. The idea of how the art is linked specifically to a copy of authenticity goes along with the decentralized nature of crypto and NFTs. It might be the one thing about this story that makes objective sense amidst the comedy of absurd art.
It may sound ridiculous, but one of the editions of “Comedian” is held in the Guggenheim after it was donated to the museum by an anonymous donor. Meanwhile the original edition that was housed in Art Basel Miami Beach apparently drew a staggering amount of visitors. The influx was so heavy that they had to remove the work from view.
And yes, Sun plans to eat the banana. If the concept is the art, then altering the concept by eating the banana kind of alters the concept and transforms the artwork itself when you think about it.
UPDATE
Sun ate the banana during a press conference this morning.
