Tom Bubul .info
tombubul@gmail, @tombubul. Initial post 12/9/2019, last modified .
Like all artists I know, I expect to be asked about "Comedian" in social and family situations repeatedly in the upcoming weeks, probably all the way thru at least the spring of 2020. Anticipating that, I thought I could save myself some time in those situations by taking an entire Sunday to make a page about it. Maybe you can refer to it and save yourself some time too?
Maurizio Cattelan "Comedian" FAQ
What is "Comedian"?
The artwork is a ripe banana duct-taped to a wall, first installed at Art Basel Miami in December 2019, as instructed by the internationally recognized Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960, active since about 1989).
Why is "Comedian" worth $120,000?
Setting aside what "worth" could ever possibly mean in an art context for one minute here, my answer is, because it's not a banana on a wall - it's a specific artist making a gesture at Basel, the "most important" art fair of the year, entering that gesture into the permanent record of their career, and that gesture being legible as valid in that career context. The art banana isn't a non-sequitur, as it would be for almost any other artist with the opportunity to show work/grovel before money at Basel; for Cattelan, it's a fitting continuation of the same insider joking about art's relationship to wealth, and of art's pained "cringe comedy" pursuit of new lows provoked by wealth's venality before it, that permeates his work to date. This is why the gesture "works" (and commands value). It's not just some guy deciding "art banana" - it's a career culminating in "art banana."
What collectors are collecting is the idea of that referent in context - an art banana as a pretty effectively disgusting/shocking synecdoche for an entire career - not merely the standalone idea of a banana duct-taped to a wall. This is what makes it uniquely possible for Cattelan to edition this gesture at a value of any number greater than the cost of one banana and one roll of duct tape. Of course, the specific $120,000 price tag is speculative and arbitrary; that just seems driven by a shot at what seemed comfortable given the likely temperature in the room.
What does "Comedian" mean on a "content" level?
It's a pretty basic provocation on the order of any given "emperor's new clothes" art world take: a gesture toward the lowest possibilities of what value-carrying, "meaningless" artwork in the context of wealth could potentially be. "Will you go this low?" it asks the rich. "Sure," the rich laugh knowingly, and that's the work. The piece's novelty is in the dizzying dissonance calmly asserted between its direct value as artwork - of which there is nakedly and intentionally very little - and its referential value toward a successful international career, described above, of which there is at least speculatively a lot.
Importantly to me, "Comedian" is ultimately a product - its message isn't "eat the rich," it's "fuck you, pay me." It's an insider work that doesn't seek to dismantle or depart from the grotesque money reality that underpins Basel or what we most often mean when we say "the art world" - rather it straightforwardly intends to laugh with and profit from it. If anything, this to me is the main thing that's annoying or potentially objectionable about the work.
Does it make sense to get mad about the banana?
No; the banana is just a symptom.
Why were people waiting in line to see "Comedian" anyway?
Even though systems often function as entities ("the art world"), they can't be literally encountered (or held accountable) as entities directly, the way individual people sometimes can be. Rarely, however, a representative (or a process-leftover) expresses something on behalf of a system that provides unimpeachable, direct evidence of something that was understood to be true only in the unverifiable abstract. When this happens it forces the system to reconfigure itself to accommodate its own truth-speaking, and/or for consumers of the system to reorder their ideas of either its reality or their own to accommodate. ("Grab 'em by the pussy" springs to mind here.)
What I think people were waiting in line for wasn't to have an art experience, but to see for themselves the monstrous truth rumored to be present at Basel: That the abundant frivolousness and perverse mutations wrought on artwork by money, abundantly visible all around, have themselves manifested physically, and opened a naked, dripping eye, which can be looked into to eliminate all doubt about what's really behind all of this... and that it's at the Perrotin Gallery booth.
But per above, "Comedian" isn't really a tear in the system fabric of the art world that can be peered into to see some otherwise hidden truth - it's just an artwork that impersonates one. Despite the wishes of those waiting to see it, and despite what it convincingly suggests, in fact it's just another small thing for sale. Sure it was deinstalled early, but only because the Fair was worried that lined-up festival visitors might obliviously bump into and damage other more directly-invested artworks while waiting to see it. As a work, "Comedian" itself is a sanctioned, acceptable gesture that threatens nothing.
Why a banana? Why duct tape?
I think the materials decisions here are really satisfying and should be appreciated as good choices. I also think this is the "best part" of the work: I really can't think of a more appropriate material pairing to produce the effects these choices produce.
Everyone knows bananas rot, everyone knows the nasty feeling of applying tape to a slightly moist organic surface that resists and will gradually fail to adhere. While bananas and duct tape are common, they're never paired this way under any normal circumstance. You know that left alone, the banana is gonna rot and drip down the wall, and that a wet piece of tape is gonna just be hanging there, over a stain, before it flops to the floor too. Seeing and anticipating these things are part of the work, but getting to see them reach that state is not. The result is nasty on an immediate tactile level and mildly dreadful on an "I left town but forgot to take out the trash" level: the clear sense the work broadcasts is, who's gonna clean this up? Can't everyone see it's gonna get nastier? (The entendres here related to the commercial are, I'll generously assume, intended - tho I think it's wrong to read the work as "a critique" or "a polemic," when at most I think it can be called "a joke.")
Why a banana and not a slice of Boar's Head ham, or something? My first thought seeing "Comedian" was that it was a Warhol riff, so that's my guess. Consider the late 20th century king's banana: an unchanging screenprint that's gonna repeat eternally thru pop culture forever, the original carefully archived. Here we see the full opposite: An unarchivable actual banana, crossed out on a wall, rotting... that's gonna repeat thru my feed for at least a few more months. And why duct tape? Because it's the ultimate signifier of (and medium for) ad hoc temporary solutions.
What's up with the guy who ate the banana?
Droll but not meaningful; file under Soy Bomb.
Do I like "Comedian"?
What, me? Broadly in all media I find that what's important isn't the valence of a reaction ("liking" vs. "not liking" something) but the relative size of any given reaction to having no reaction at all. For instance, I often feel that movies I hate are of greater interest and provide me more fodder over time than movies I don't care about much either way, and that in the long term, their "absolute value" to me is comparable - sometimes indistinguishable - to that of movies I love.
You're supposed to find "Comedian" tactilely unsettling, demonically smirking, representing the worst possibilities of artwork and the most profligate and stupefying extremes of the art world, etc., but whether you "hate it" for those things or "love it" for them isn't really important. What's important is the extent to which you feel forced to form an opinion in the face of it, or find it difficult to ignore. I obviously find it super difficult to ignore.
I'll add that while I find jokey conceptual commercial artwork to be corny in general, and anything that makes the "general public" more suspicious of the possibilities of artwork to be actively bad, and consumerism to be an absolute plague on the earth, I find it difficult to dislike Cattelan, really as much as I wish I could (mainly I think because I find his sculpture of John Paul II hit by a meteorite to be funny enough to carry the weight).
Is it art?
Despite how cruel and dumb it is, and how complicated and unfortunate its circumstances, yes, "Comedian" is an artwork. Hopefully the above is helpful in illustrating how and why.
Now what?
If you liked this or found it useful, feel free to buy me a coconut water by sending me five dollars. :)
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