GOING, GOING, GONE BANANAS: Cattelan’s 'Comedian' Takes $6+ Million at Auction
VIDEO: See it at Sotheby's @chelseagallerista UPDATE: Comedian just hammered for $5.2m (plus $1m in fees). +++ IN EXACTLY 5 minutes time, bidding will open at Sotheby’s New York for a slew of contemporary artworks with low estimates ranging from $50k to $12 million (Yu Nishimura's Pause (2020) and Stuart Davis' Contranuities , respectively). Falling somewhere in between is disrupter Maurizio Cattelan’s much-hyped Comedian (2019) , aka “the duct-taped banana.” It’s the latest contemporary art gambit to dominate your scroll since the shredded Banksy , the AI-robot painter , the NFT cash grab , the $450m Salvatore Mundi … Originally bodega-priced at $120k, Comedian is estimated to hammer for $1-1.5 million, depending on how many “bites” it gets. The winner receives neither fruit nor roll of duct tape, but instead, a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. This slip of paper represents little more than an artworld “consensus” that the buyer owns one...
