Art critic Jason Farago looks beneath the peel of a very famous banana. Are you a philistine if you don't get it? And what is it really worth?
'Art may be long, and life short, but the existence of a hand fruit is most ephemeral of all. This week at Art Basel Miami Beach, the art world’s premier Champagne-steeped swap meet, no work drew more grins, guffaws and selfies than a new sculpture by the semiretired Italian trickster Maurizio Cattelan: a banana duct-taped to the wall, its peel already speckled with brown spots.
It’s titled “Comedian.” By Wednesday it had already won art-world notoriety, and on Saturday it achieved a public visibility that any artist would envy, after a self-promoting wag tore the banana off the wall and gobbled it up. (Not many iconic art works can also be said to be a rich source of potassium.)
Suffice it to say that works of contemporary art rarely make the cover of the New York Post, but this is Mr. Cattelan’s second recent appearance on the tabloid’s front page; in 2016, he emerged from semiretirement to install a functional 18-karat-gold toilet in a restroom of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which drew snaking lines of art lovers. Now the Italian artist is back in the headlines and the Instagram stories, and his purloined banana has offered the perfect weapon to those who think that contemporary art is one big prank. I can only imagine the “60 Minutes” segment this would elicit if Morley Safer were still alive.' ... Keep reading on The New York Times
'Art may be long, and life short, but the existence of a hand fruit is most ephemeral of all. This week at Art Basel Miami Beach, the art world’s premier Champagne-steeped swap meet, no work drew more grins, guffaws and selfies than a new sculpture by the semiretired Italian trickster Maurizio Cattelan: a banana duct-taped to the wall, its peel already speckled with brown spots.
It’s titled “Comedian.” By Wednesday it had already won art-world notoriety, and on Saturday it achieved a public visibility that any artist would envy, after a self-promoting wag tore the banana off the wall and gobbled it up. (Not many iconic art works can also be said to be a rich source of potassium.)
Suffice it to say that works of contemporary art rarely make the cover of the New York Post, but this is Mr. Cattelan’s second recent appearance on the tabloid’s front page; in 2016, he emerged from semiretirement to install a functional 18-karat-gold toilet in a restroom of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which drew snaking lines of art lovers. Now the Italian artist is back in the headlines and the Instagram stories, and his purloined banana has offered the perfect weapon to those who think that contemporary art is one big prank. I can only imagine the “60 Minutes” segment this would elicit if Morley Safer were still alive.' ... Keep reading on The New York Times