Maurizio Cattelan
Appearances
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
So over the past five years, the banana has gone on to have an incredibly strange afterlife. Several editions have sold, you know, between $120,000 and $150,000. One has since gotten donated to the Guggenheim, one of the most important museums in New York City. Others have gone on to become basically deified in meme form, and it ultimately culminated in an auction at Sotheby's.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
You want me to peel it back a little bit? Is that what you're asking me to do?
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
What does the banana tell us? Is that what you're asking?
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Well, let's try to run through all the puns we can possibly think of.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
I don't want to slip up and miss any. Okay, so the piece is called Comedian and what it actually is is a real banana and, you know, a stretch of duct tape and it needs to be on a wall. But when you as the owner buy this piece, what you actually get are... A 14-page list of instructions that sort of doubles as a certificate of authenticity. 14 pages? Yeah.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Yeah, I think there are some illustrations. There's some illustrations. Okay, okay. And what the artist wants to illustrate are a few of the rules that accompany the work, which means you go out and you buy your own banana and your own duct tape. And you can create the work anywhere you want, but it needs to be on a white wall.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
It needs to be a certain number of inches up from the floor, so roughly eye level. The banana needs to be sort of arcing to the right, not the left, and it needs to be vertical, so not like a smile. It needs to be upright, and then the duct tape has to be, you know, diagonal.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Yeah, after a few days, you take it down and you can put up another one. Yeah. It's ever evolving.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
I did see this banana duct taped to a wall And I saw a little half circle of people I call, you know, little looky-loos just taking pictures of it. And they were not the types to buy the work. They were just having fun and posing and taking selfies with it. And I remember in that moment, like, oh, isn't that cute? But I logged it and then I moved on.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
So absolutely nothing except that you could have done the same thing with, you know, a Campbell's can of tomato soup, but that doesn't make it a Warhol, right? So you don't have the version that the artist called art.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
he's noticing that this sort of never-ending stream of art fairs just keeps getting more and more populated with big, splashy, abstract painting, figurative painting. And he starts to get annoyed that the entire art world is just sort of glomming onto all these splashy, pretty paintings. And where's the bite, right? Where's the provocation? And so he comes out of
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
retirement to put this banana on the wall. And it really was kind of his like middle finger to the art market. He really was trying to say, look, you know, this entire fair is going to be brimming with pretty paintings.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
So why don't I just cut through all the noise of that and I'll just do something simple and a little bit provocative and I will put a banana on the wall and I will call it art and let's just see what sort of, you know, grenade goes off or not.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
I think it was just funny. It was funny and simple and audacious. And the idea that an artist would call this art, the idea that it would have value and the idea that other people would agree with him that it has value. There's just a level of absurdity there that he acknowledges. He was trying to lean into that.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
I think he was on the one hand, I'm sure very tickled because he had caused a stir. And that's really what he's always wanted to do as an artist is sort of make waves and start a conversation. And I think he was certainly pleased, certainly pleased by that, because that is part of what he wanted to do was just to sort of shake things up a little bit. And he certainly did.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
So there are various reasons why art sells and doesn't sell, but the art market is cyclical like anything else, right? And there are certain years where everyone is feeling flush and the world's wealthy feel like it's a good idea to buy and sell art at the very upper reaches and everything's fine and the art world feels like a party.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
And then there are things like war and elections and the pandemic and these macroeconomic factors that can cause... even if they're the world's wealthiest people. These are billionaires. They have money in good markets and bad, right? They have it, but they feel a little sensitive to sort of splurge. It's a confidence game, right? How confident do they feel spending millions of dollars on art?
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
And so the market's been sort of in a downturn for the last couple of years. And the auction houses who are market makers were probably behind doors, were probably in a little bit of a panic of just like, how do we change this narrative?
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
How do we make the idea of buying and selling art fun again? Because this is meant to be kind of a respite for the world's wealthy, right? So I feel like it was really a marketing bonanza and sort of a stroke of genius on Sotheby's part to go out and seek this banana because they knew that it would change the narrative, or at least they think they hoped it did.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Exactly. I've been humming that for days. So when I walked into the auction room, the anticipation was building, but people didn't have to wait too long. And the artworks kind of come out on this thing, like sort of the turntable sort of swiveled, right?
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
And then out came this banana taped to the wall with one, you know, very tickled art handler standing there like Vanna White, you know, beside this banana.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
And the scene was so ridiculous. Everyone's cell phones went up. It was like whoosh, this vertical whoosh of, I mean, cynical art dealers, folks who've been buying and selling art for decades. None of them could resist the urge to snap a little picture of that thing on the turntable.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Oh, dude, you know I was already Instagram-living it. I mean, I was theirs, yeah.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Yeah, I finally got my moment with the Dane banana. I mean, of course, I had it with like 600 or 700 people in this auction room.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
So the winner of the banana is this young guy in his early 30s named Justin Sun. And he is the co-founder of a cryptocurrency platform called Tron. And he is a very colorful character who sort of came into the art world back in the beginning days of the NFT boom. You know, back when people were... You know, JPEGs were selling for $70 million. You remember that, right? During the pandemic.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
So a lot of these guys sort of came into this world of collecting back then. And they sort of stuck around.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Okay, so my beginnings with the banana was the opening day of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Same thing. Yep. That clicked for him in big ways. And he found that very profound that this artwork actually operated just like things on the blockchain do. And for him, that bridge, right, was so enticing. He just felt like he had to own it.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
And we totally missed the point, which is that the entire rest of the art world thinks that the art world is an entire, you know, rigged game and a scam and a joke. And did the emperor like even wear clothes to the fair that day? Because somebody duct taped a banana to a wall and asked $120,000 for it. And that moment probably did need to stop and be reckoned with in real time.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
So it says, one, that it's not dead and that markets are always going to fluctuate and they're probably object-driven as much as they are driven by, you know, these macroeconomic factors. But I think it definitely made this really fun. And for the auction houses, that's really important because they're meant to be this playground for the world's wealthy, right?
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
And everyone is really closely tracking how the world's wealthy feel because, you know, If wealthy people feel like the economy is in an upward trajectory, they can really throw their weight around. And so I think people are maybe more cautiously optimistic about where the art market is going from here. And they have some fun track record to point to, you know, in the next go around.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Oh, Ryan, that's not even a question I allow myself to go to. I'm a reporter. Yeah, I know. I do. It's like an impossible question for me. Like, I think, you know, when I head to our Basel, Miami Beach, will I give some extra pause to any groups of people that I see loitering around anything? Like, yes, I will be more tempted to stop and make sure I'm not missing anything.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
The banana tells us, right, that the art market and the art world operate on an intellectual and comedic and financial plane that strike the rest of us as completely insane. And the truth is, like, if you're going to go and buy a piece of canvas and some tubes of oil paint and then slather it on a thing, it should probably only be worth... you know, a few dozen dollars.
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Like when you start to think about the materials that become art, it's just paint. But then we collectively as a society decide that that picture painted by like some guy named Pablo Picasso, right? Turns out to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right?
The Journal.
The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal
Or Da Vinci, you know, like this is the whole construct of art is that we as a society decide to agree that something that maybe inherently has very minimal value has a cultural... value way outstripping the materials that were used to make it. And so that is kind of the bargain that we make with all artworks. It's just rarely that it's something that can rot after a few days.