How Maurizio Cattelan’s Banana Sent the Internet Into a Frenzy of Jokes, Product Placement, and Claims of Plagiarism

When Parisian gallery Perrotin unveiled Comedian,
Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000
conceptual art piece of a real banana, duct taped
to the wall, at Art Basel Miami Beach,
it sent the meme factory into overdrive. Within minutes of the
kick-off of the fair’s opening day, Cattelan was receiving texts
from friends who were recreating the artwork at home. Almost
instantly, it became a viral sensation.

The unassuming banana unleashed total chaos on Miami. Not
one but two collectors purchased editions of the work in the fair’s
opening hours on Wednesday. The dealer then raised the price on the
third edition to $150,000, and sold it to a collector who will
donate it to a museum, according to the Art Newspaper.
Two artist proofs were not sold, despite widespread demand.

The banana installation became such a spectacle in the Miami
Beach Convention Center that the gallery had to put up a velvet
rope in front of the piece to control the crowds. The
banana-induced frenzy hit its zenith Saturday afternoon, when
performance artist David Datuna ate the artwork. Datuna
sauntered over, took down the banana, peeled it, and began eating
it, telling the crowd he was a “hungry artist.”

Although the gallery had sourced a spare banana in the event of
just such an incident, Perrotin chose to remove the banana from the
booth for the last day. He was following recommendations from the
fair, which was concerned that that the banana was drawing
uncontrollable crowds that risked damaging other nearby
artworks.

In its place, one fairgoer scrawled the phrase “Epstein Didn’t
Kill Himself” across the empty white wall in red lipstick,
referring to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had close
ties to many wealthy and powerful figures in business and politics.
His death at a New York prison was officially ruled a suicide, but
has birthed numerous conspiracy theories. At Art Basel, the
message—a popular internet meme—was quickly covered up with white
cardboard, according to the New York Daily News.

Over the course of the week, hilarious interpretations of the
$120,000 banana abounded on social media, including a version from
cryptocurrency artist CryptoGraffiti titled The
Commodity, which instructed collectors to find and claim a
banana with a bitcoin key address
carved into it.

Many of the posts replaced the banana with other food items,
from sausages to pomegranates to Moon Pies. This last came in a
post from the snack food company itself.

Not to be outdone, Popeyes Chicken immediately partnered with
Miami’s San Paul Gallery Urban Art, taping a fried chicken
sandwich to the wall. Titled The Sandwich, it
was listed at $120,003.99. “And yes,” a press release boasted,
“a buyer has already inquired about purchasing ‘The Sandwich’.”

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Others doubled down on the banana, taping ones up in unexpected
places, including the New York subway and on a palm tree elsewhere
in Miami. Photoshop experts also got to work, creating mashups
with other famous artworks, including pairing it with Cattelan’s
infamous golden toilet,
America, recently
stolen from Blenheim Palace in the UK.

Artnet News’s own photograph of two fashionable women
photographing the banana has been reproduced in numerous mainstream
news outlets, including CNN, NBC, and Fox Business.Artist Adrian
Wilson even turned my Instagram post about the story into a
doctored image of the post, hung in a gallery as a piece of Richard
Prince-style appropriation art.

Wilson’s other takes on the work included a new version of
Leonardo da Vinci’s Creation of Adam, and a duct
taped Jeff Koons tulip, inspired by the unpopular Parisian
monument.

Then there were those who wanted to lay claim to the concept of
the banana themselves. After the initial post about Cattelan went
viral, I heard from an Instagram account dedicated entirely to
photographs of bananas in distress, @yellow_and_helpless. Meth Fountain
showed a half-eaten croissant hung on
the wall at this year’s FIAC fair in Paris, and street artist
Evgeny Ches dug up a photograph of a mural he painted in 2015 of a banana
taped to the wall.

Dutch artist Carine Weve provided a
screenshot of a banana attached to a canvas by zip ties, with
metadata proving the work dated to 2006, when she was a student at
the Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands.

(Even my husband unearthed the desiccated husk of a banana that
hung on his dorm room wall from 2007–2009, texting me a photo and
declaring himself vindicated for all the times I had tried to get
him to throw it away over the years.)

Art Basel’s satellite fairs attempted to get in on the action as
well—PULSE Miami Beach’s publicist pitched a round-up of banana
works on view around the city, noting that Allie
Ellis’s Banana
Grandma and Alexi Torres’s The Banana
Cathedral were both for sale at the fair.

Of course, this humble fruit has had its fair share of art
historical moments over the years. There was Andy Warhol’s famed
1967 album cover for the Velvet Underground, and, as New
York Times art critic Roberta Smith pointed out on Twitter, the Guerrilla Girls have been using the
banana as a symbol for decades.

Among the many responses to Cattelan’s now-infamous banana,
sister group to the anonymous feminist artist collective, Guerilla Girls Broadband, is offering their
own artwork inspired by Comedian, for sale for
$120,001—one dollar more than Cattelan’s piece. The piece features
an unripened green banana, taped to the wall above the message
“funny how men always think they invented the banana joke” and
“comes with certificate of authenticity and a healthy dose of
feminism.”

See other social media posts inspired by Cattelan below.

The post How Maurizio Cattelan’s Banana Sent the Internet
Into a Frenzy of Jokes, Product Placement, and Claims of
Plagiarism appeared first on artnet News.