Buyers of Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 Banana Defend the Work as ‘the Unicorn of the Art World,’ Comparing It to Warhol’s Soup Cans

The banana that sparked a deluge
of think pieces and media
hype at Art Basel Miami Beach last week shows no signs of
slowing down. And those who dropped around $120,000 on their
purchase of an edition of Marizio Cattelan’s Comedian—which is, as everyone now knows, a banana
duct-taped to a wall—are now stepping forward to defend their
purchases.

Billy and Beatrice Cox of Miami,
Florida released a statement to Page
Six on their
acquisition, calling the work “the unicorn of the art world” and
comparing it to Andy Warhol’s iconic 1962 Campbell’s Soup Cans. The couple also shared their intention to
loan and eventually donate the artwork to a museum.

“When we saw the public
debate Comedian sparked about art and our society, we decided
to purchase it,” the pair said. “We bought it to ensure that it
would be accessible to the public forever, to fuel debate and
provoke thoughts and emotion in a public space in
perpetuity.” 

They also specified plans to
replace the fruit every two days in order to keep it “ripe,”
although they are “acutely aware of the blatant absurdity of the
fact that Comedian is an otherwise inexpensive and perishable
piece of produce and a couple of inches of duct tape.”

Though the item itself is
perpetually under threat of decomposition, Emmanuel Perrotin,
founder of the gallery selling Cattelan’s work, emphasized to
the New York
Times that the real
value of the work lies in the certificate of authenticity, which
includes a manual for installation. “All artwork costs a lot of
money,” Perrotin said. “They buy an idea, they buy a
certificate.”

Billy Cox is a member of the
Bancroft family, which in 2007 reportedly sold its shares of Dow
Jones & Company, publishers of the Wall Street Journal, to News Corp. for over $5 billion. He and his
wife are described as having been collecting art for over two
decades.

Sarah Andelman, the Paris-based
founder of Colette, is the collector who snapped up the first
edition of the work, which is also her first major art purchase. In
tune with Perrotin’s words, she says she will hang the certificate
of authenticity in her office. Whether it will be displayed next to
the banana itself is still up in the air.

“People who usually would not
have been so interested in art wanted to see ‘the banana,’” the
Coxes went on to say. “It has opened the floodgates and morphed
into an important debate about the value we place on works of art
and objects in general.” 

The post Buyers of Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 Banana
Defend the Work as ‘the Unicorn of the Art World,’ Comparing It to
Warhol’s Soup Cans appeared first on artnet News.