Bananas in art, bananas about art.
By now, whether you’re an art enthusiast or not, you’ll likely have heard about the duct-taped banana artwork, Comedian by the satirical jokester extraordinaire Maurizio Cattelan selling for $6.2m at Sotheby’s New York this week.
Three editions of the artwork, which originally debuted at the Perrotin stand of the 2019 Art Basel Miami Beach, were sold during the fair, priced between $120,000 and $150,000. Considering the artist describes the work as “a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value”, the fact that the artwork has just sold for fifty times its original selling price, only 5 years after its release, certainly makes us wonder what it is that we value indeed. The beautiful absurdity of an artwork that was intended to criticise the market it was bound for, and yet became an infamous best-selling product of that market, is surely not lost on anyone.
As we munch on our much more affordable banana in the office, pondering the brilliant multifaceted art world, today we bring you art exhibitions honouring the humble, potassium-filled, innuendo-rich, bain of the slipping clown, Banana, that’s B-A-N-A-N-A, sing it with us.
Powered by colonist practices beginning in the 1800s, the banana spread globally to become the most consumed fruit in the world, amassing 115.74 million metric tons of global consumption, so it’s no wonder that the Banana plays such an important role in art – it’s everywhere.
From de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) to Warhol’s iconic Banana, decorating the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico Album (1967), to the ever-comical works of Shrigley, and even to over forty years of bananas spraypainted on the facades of over 4000 art institutions worldwide by the Banana Sprayer, the German artist Thomas Baumgärtel.
Three recent exhibitions in the Artfacts database that featured bananas were:
The 2023 group show Banana Branches at LAMB Gallery in London, exploring the history of the banana, in particular, the “past and still existing social and commercial inequalities and tension between regions affected by their colonial history and those countries that excessed their colonial power”, the exhibition featured several highly ranked ultra-contemporary and contemporary artists, including Paulo Nazareth, Natalia LL, and Theo Mercier amongst others.
The 2023 solo show Who Ate The Banana? by Japanese Artist, Mitsuzuka Shinji, at Gallery Scena, where the artist’s views of contemporary capitalism as a “comedy” and of a society shaken by the pursuit of profit and information overload, were explored.
The 2023 Solo Show Banana Philosophy by American artist Christine Tien Wang, at PTT Space in Taiwan. The exhibition explores her experiences as an “American-born Chinese woman engaging with the complex legacy of her Chinese heritage within the larger environment of American racial politics.” The Banana philosophy of her show title explores the idea of “Yellow on the outside, white on the inside,” playing on a Chinese pejorative for Westernized youths, symbolising both cultural loss and successful assimilation into white American middle-class norms.
As Comedian debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach, all eyes are turned to the 2024 event opening next week: who knows what will raise eyebrows this year? For the many of you journeying to Miami, don’t forget, Artfacts is here to help you along the way; our price orientation tool offers guidance, our gallery and artist ranking tools provide valuable and speedy insight, and the December edition of our Heat Index will go live next week, right on time to inspire your fair browsing.
Go on, use us, you’d be bananas not to.