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When I started dating my now husband, the decor in his dorm apartment included a banana that he and his roommates had drunkenly taped to the wall. ...Twelve years later, believe it or not, he still has it in a plastic bag somewhere in our apartment.
So imagine my surprise when I arrived at the VIP preview for Art Basel Miami Beach and discovered that Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan had done exactly the same thing. The most important difference being, of course, that this version—sourced from a local Miami supermarket and on sale from Perrotin, the Parisian gallery with locations in New York and across Asia—cost a cool $120,000.
"We sold it already," announced a triumphant Emmanuel Perrotin as I took a close look at the piece, titled Comedian. The buyer, a French woman, has bought work from the gallery before, but never a work by Cattelan, I was told.
By the time I left the booth, a deal on a second edition of the piece had also been closed, sold to a French man. (Perrotin told him about my husband's banana, to reassure him that the banana would age well, and the collector threatened to buy that one instead.)
[...] After the second sale, Perrotin quickly texted Cattelan, and the two agreed to raise the price to $150,000 for the third edition of the work, which they have decided to sell to a museum—and two institutions have already expressed interest, according to the gallery. (There are also two artists proofs of the work, only one of which is for sale.)
[...] The artist wouldn't speak to the work's meaning, but he was partially inspired by the large number of paintings he's seen at galleries recently. "I'm not in Miami, but I'm sure it's full of paintings as well," said Cattelan. "I thought maybe a banana could be a good contribution!"
https://news.artnet.com/market/maurizio-cattelan-banana-art-basel-miami-beach-1722516
(Score: 1) by Ron on Thursday December 12 2019, @05:22PM
This only proves that some people have more money than brains.
Also, that Modern Art is nothing but an exercise in arrogance.
Fish tanks with basketballs in it, a vacuum cleaner on a pedestal, a urinal, a short piece of rope thumb-tacked to the wall, three common flourescent light fixtures on a wall... all these and more have been celebrated as modern art and sold for ridiculous amounts of money.
Did the industrial designers of the vacuum, the basketballs, the urinal, the lights, etc. get any royalties from the sale of that "art?" Modern art is also a hypocrisy in addition to pure arrogance. It is a game of egos.