“The Comedian” is a work by the artist Maurizio Cattelan. The assemblage (a painting or collage with three-dimensional objects) is a banana taped to the wall.
The sculpture, as the artist himself officially calls it, was first presented by the French gallery Perrotin at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in December 2019.
The work has sold three times in a row for amounts ranging from $120,000 to $150,000, has become a worldwide sensation and an Internet meme hero. “The Comedian” attracted so much attention that it had to be removed from the gallery’s booth before the fair ended because of the enormous influx of viewers.
In September 2020, an anonymous benefactor donated Cattelan’s work to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Museum director Richard Armstrong has already joked that the work won’t be much of a burden on the repository. So far, the inclusion of the work in the exhibition of the museum is out of the question. Nevertheless, museum directors noted that the museum has accepted the gift with gratitude, since the Cattelan object is undoubtedly part of the recent history of contemporary culture as a whole. The museum director also recalled the importance of the artist’s living connection to modern art history.
Sources at the Guggenheim Museum told us that in fact the gift is a certificate of authenticity and an impressive instruction manual explaining how the exhibit should be mounted and displayed. Neither the banana nor even the very scotch used in the Miami exhibit includes the case. If the Comedian is to be exhibited, it will most likely be in one of the museum’s temporary exhibitions, and the fruit used will be disposed of periodically.
Heir to an industrial empire, Swiss-born collector and philanthropist Solomon Guggenheim founded the museum of the same name in New York in 1937. Today, the museum is one of the most fundamental and popular contemporary art collections in the world.