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
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?
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.
I mean, it was completely unforgettable.
It was bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Absolutely.
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?
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.
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.
Oh, dude, you know I was already Instagram-living it. I mean, I was theirs, yeah.
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.
$5,100,000.
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.
So a lot of these guys sort of came into this world of collecting back then. And they sort of stuck around.
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.
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?
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.
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 banana boat, if you will.
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.
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?
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.
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