Probably the most talked-about lot of the New York public sale season, the duct-taped banana by Maurizio Cattelan, bought for a hammer value of $5.2m ($6.2m with charges) at Sotheby’s New York after a seven-minute bidding battle.
Comic (2019), which consists of a banana connected to a wall with silver duct tape, got here to the block Wednesday (20 November) at Sotheby’s The Now and Up to date public sale. The profitable bid far exceeded the public sale home’s $1m to $1.5m estimate.
Bidders drove the value as much as $5.2m earlier than a winner emerged, with a Chinese language purchaser on the cellphone with Jen Hua, the deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, outdueling on-line bidders. Sotheby’s mentioned after the sale that the customer was Justin Solar, a Chinese language collector and founding father of the cryptocurrency platform Tron. Solar has beforehand bid on different splashy public sale tons, together with shopping for a $78m Giacometti sculpture at Sotheby’s in 2021 and, he claims, narrowly lacking out on Beeple’s record-breaking NFT (non-fungible token) earlier that very same yr.
Comic “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of artwork, memes, and the cryptocurrency neighborhood”, Solar mentioned in a press release by way of Sotheby’s after buying the lot. “I imagine this piece will encourage extra thought and dialogue sooner or later and can develop into part of historical past.” Solar plans to eat the banana, he added, as a approach of “honouring its place in each artwork historical past and fashionable tradition”.
Sotheby’s mentioned earlier than the sale that the public sale home would settle for cryptocurrency for the work and confirmed that Solar can pay in crypto, although it didn’t specify which foreign money.
Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker opens the bidding on Maurizio Cattelan’s Comic (2019) Screenshot view YouTube
The lot, which got here to public sale backed by a assure, features a single roll of duct tape and one banana, the latter of which the public sale home has sourced from the fruit stand exterior its headquarters on York Avenue, the place Wednesday’s public sale was held. The winner of the public sale turns into the proprietor of a certificates of authenticity and particular directions by Cattelan for how one can show the work.
When Cattelan debuted Comic at Perrotin’s stand throughout Artwork Basel Miami Seaside in 2019, it was his first “sculpture” in 15 years and he described the work as “a honest commentary and a mirrored image on what we worth”. The work shortly grew to become the preferred object on the occasion, and Perrotin took it down earlier than the top of the truthful attributable to crowd considerations. Comic has been derided as each a consequence of art-market extra and lauded as a tongue-in-cheek image of its personal absurdity. The banana part of the work has been eaten whereas on show twice, first by a efficiency artist at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside and once more by a hungry artwork scholar on the Leeum Museum of Artwork in Seoul in 2023 (when knowledgeable of the latter incident, Cattelan mentioned it was “no downside in any respect”.)
Perrotin bought three editions of the work in the course of the truthful in 2019, priced between $120,000 and $150,000. The version bought at Sotheby’s beforehand traded arms privately, based on the public sale home. One other has been acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
