An Italian artist stuck a banana to a wall and raked in CA$160,000.
One man’s banana became an artist’s masterpiece at this year’s Art Basel, an exclusive, star-studded art fair that happens every year in Miami, Fla., Basel, Switzerland, and Hong Kong, China.
Mauizio Cattelan is known for his satirical artwork, but this year’s big-ticket sell took the cake.
His piece of art called Comedian, which features a yellow banana stuck to a wall with duct tape, sold for thousands to a French woman.
READ MORE: French woman didn’t realize she owned a masterpiece — it just sold for almost $35M
According to ArtNet, a second version of the piece sold shortly after to a French man.
A third edition of the work was sold to a museum, at the decidedly higher price of nearly CA$200,000. The price was agreed upon by Cattelan and Perrotin, the Parisian gallery in which Comedian was on view during the Florida festival.
Cattelan said he’d been working on this creation for a year.
“Wherever I was travelling, I had this banana on the wall. I couldn’t figure out how to finish it,” he told the art publication. “In the end, one day I woke up and said ‘the banana is supposed to be a banana.'”
The artist made waves in the art world in 2017 with the creation of his 18-carat-gold toilet entitled America.
The US$6-million fixture was stolen this summer from England’s Blenheim Palace.
Speaking to CBS, Emmanuel Perrotin, the gallery founder, said Cattelan’s work investigates the way objects move through the world.
READ MORE: Painting stolen in broad daylight recovered by Russian police
“Whether affixed to the wall of an art fair booth or displayed on the cover of the New York Post, his work forces us to question how value is placed on material goods,” he said.
“The spectacle is as much a part of the work as the banana.”
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