Maurizio Cattelan’s Duct-Taped Banana Expected to Fetch $1 Million at Auction

Comedian, a 2019 sculpture by Conceptual artistMaurizio Cattelancomprising a banana duct-taped to a wall, isheaded to auctionwith an estimated price tag of between $1 million and $1.5 million. The buyer of the work will receive a banana, a roll of duct tape, a certificate of authenticity, and instructions for the sculpture’s display. The auction is set to take place November 20 at Sotheby’s in New York, where it will be on view on October 28 before traveling to London, Paris, Milan, Hong Kong, Dubai, Taipei, Tokyo, and Los Angeles ahead of its return to the Big Apple. According to theArt Newspaper, the star banana was sourced by Sotheby’s staff from a nearby fruit stand.

The elongated yellow fruit set tongues wagging at its 2019 Art Basel Miami Beach debut, where it was on offer by Perrotin Gallery for a comparatively paltry $120,000. The sculpture ultimately had to be removed from view before the fair’s end owing to what gallery officials described as “uncontrollable crowd movements.” Since then, three editions ofComedianhave been sold: one to fashion retailer Sarah Andelman; one to Miami-based collectors William and Beatrice Cox, who announced that they planned to donate it to a museum (an edition of the work was subsequently gifted anonymously to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York); and one to an anonymous collector. Sotheby’s has said that the iteration on offer had already been sold privately before being consigned.

The subject of both admiration and derision, Comedian has twice been torn off the wall and eaten. Cattelan has said that he did not intend the work as a joke, telling the Art Newspaper in 2021 that “it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value.”

David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in the Americas, in a statement affirmed Cattelan’s view, saying, “If at its core, Comedian questions the very notion of the value of art, then putting the work at auction this November will be the ultimate realization of its essential conceptual idea—the public will finally have a say in deciding its true value.”