Banana taped to wall valued at one million

Auction house Sotheby's has put up for auction one of three "editions" of the work by artist Maurizio Cattelan called "The Comedian" – a banana taped to a wall.

According to CNN, the lot is estimated to sell for $1 million to $1.5 million. For that money, the winning bidder will receive a roll of tape, a banana, a certificate of authenticity, and official installation instructions. Sotheby's confirmed that neither the tape nor the banana are originals.

“The Comedian is a conceptual work of art, and the actual physical materials are replaced with each installation,” a spokesman for the auction house said.

Five years ago, Cattelan and the French art gallery Perrotin made headlines around the world when they exhibited The Comedian at Art Basel Miami Beach. It was valued at six figures. The original was created using a banana purchased at a Miami grocery store, though the gallery said it could be substituted, according to the artist's instructions.

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The work was met with controversy in the art world, with some seeing it as rooted in a rich tradition of conceptual works dating back to Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal that questioned the value of art itself.

Things took an unexpected turn when performance artist David Datuna removed the banana from the wall, peeled it, and ate it in front of thousands of fairgoers. He later claimed it was a performance, not vandalism.

The installation was eventually removed from the Miami exhibit, but all three versions were sold. Two were bought by private collectors for $120,000, and the third was purchased for an undisclosed amount. It was later donated to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Sotheby's did not reveal the identity of the seller at the November auction, but said the work's current owner acquired it from the collection of one of the original buyers.

Cattelan himself described The Comedian as a work of commentary. In an interview with Art Newspaper in 2021, he said it was “not a joke,” calling the viral installation “a meditation on what we value.”

Edited by Nina Petrovich