I was driving down Main Street Steinbach listening to the local radio station when I heard them announce that an artist had tapped a banana to a wall, and it had sold for 120K USD. It is rare that art makes the local news so I was curious who the artist was. Contemporary art is extremely contextual–work is created within an ongoing conversation that is often not accessible to those outside the art world. To lift a work of art outside the context is like dropping in on a punchline of an inside joke.
And then I learned the name of the artist: Maurizio Cattelan. Well that made sense.
Cattalan’s body of work includes a legacy of pranks, fraud, disappearances and flat out criminal acts. I would have been more shocked to hear he had completed a landscape oil painting. Possibly disappointed? But that would not have made local news.
Born in Padua, Italy in 1960 to a working class family during a time of unprecedented industrial growth, Cattelan nevertheless grew up in poverty and received no formal art education. He broke into the art world in 1990 by appearing on the cover of Flash Art–a notable art magazine–not because he was invited, but because he bought a stack of the magazines, pasted his work onto the cover and returned them to the store. Folks who bought the magazine were duped into believing Cattelan was the featured artist.
Unless that story is fake, and he actually commissioned the work?
One of the things about Cattelan, is that it’s really hard to say what’s accurate. He is known to send imposters to take interviews for him and have impersonators deliver lectures about his work. This makes his work difficult to confirm facts, let alone assign definitive meaning.
One undeniable theme, however, is his line-crossing critiques of systems of power–while at the same time benefiting from them. Whether he is installing a sculpture of Pope John Paul II being crushed by a meteorite during the Catholic Church’s sex abuse revelations, or locking the front door to his “solo exhibit” with a note saying, “be right back”–without ever returning–or flipping off Milan’s financial district with a 36 foot sculpture of the middle finger–this artist is not afraid to push against authority, whether it is the Catholic Church, art institutions, Capitalism or governments.
He is known to some as a prankster, others as a fraud, still to others he is a genius–but whatever the case, he is certainly a “man of 1000 controversies” including taping a banana to a wall. For all his controversy, he is one of the most collected artists–and has made a very successful career of his unique method of engaging the relatively inaccessible world of art.
Comedian, aka the banana taped to a wall, is [possibly] another one of his critical works. Maybe it is a critique of the commodification of art, or perhaps it is a critique of the art world and collectors who purchase duct taped bananas–or maybe–maybe–it’s a critique of voyeuristic on-lookers who judge a work without knowing what it’s about? Wouldn’t it be funny to realize the very reason you hated the work was exactly the problem the artist is highlighting?
Whatever you might think of Maurizio Cattelan and taping a banana to a wall and calling it art, at the very least you have a bit more context for his work. Personally I think Cattelan is somewhere between fraud and genius–at any rate he has my respect for breaking into local headlines.
References:
https://flash—art.com/article/cattelan-cover-story
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-prankster-art-of-maurizio-cattelan/9
Also I listened to this podcast: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/sara-talks-art-5357322/episodes/maurizio-cattelan-the-man-who-176927172
Alexandra Ross Works 
It shows that the art world is full of shit.