Maurizio Cattelan
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Maurizio Cattelan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Okay, so my beginnings with the banana was the opening day of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019.
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.
I didn't. I didn't get my selfie.
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.
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.
You want me to peel it back a little bit? Is that what you're asking me to do?
What does the banana tell us? Is that what you're asking?
Well, let's try to run through all the puns we can possibly think of.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, after a few days, you take it down and you can put up another one. Yeah. It's ever evolving.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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