At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan presented a work of art that captured public attention and has kept it, now five years later, past any expiration date. It was deceptively simple—a banana duct-taped to a wall and titled Comedian—but it was a provocation that became the subject of discussions about the value of art.

Comedian comprises a banana, duct tape, instructions for display, and a certificate of authenticity. Maurizio Cattelan, who is known for his clever and irreverent works, described the installation as “a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value.” What at first seems amusing is really conceptual, an institutional critique of the art market, ironically offered for sale at an art fair recognized for its excess.

The banana itself is insignificant; without the certificate signed by the artist, it is only an ordinary banana. But as a conceptual work of art, it is one of an edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs, with a provenance that can be assigned economic value.

Galerie Perrotin sold all three editions during Art Basel Miami Beach. The first two went for $120,000 each, and the third for $150,000 to a buyer who donated it to the Guggenheim. Recently, number two reappeared at Sotheby’s with an estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million. The auction took place in New York on November 20, and the price with fees reached $6.2 million. The buyer was a cryptocurrency investor who made a spectacle of himself consuming the banana, oblivious to how he is now part of the joke.

Beyond market antics, Comedian suggests broader interpretations. Bananas, the world’s most consumed fruit, are inextricable from a history of colonialism and wealth extraction, subjects of the digital exhibition Banana Craze. While Cattelan’s work doesn’t directly address these, the banana highlights the symbolic potential of conceptual art.

By making a banana into art, Cattelan reveals the absurdity of the art world’s expectations and the art market’s appetite for spectacle. Comedian has become an ironic demonstration of the excesses that it critiques. By taping a banana to a wall, Cattelan didn’t just mock the art market—he let the market mock itself.

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Five years after Maurizio Cattelan announced his retirement, following a 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, a new exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris marks his return to the art world. Not Afraid of Love includes 44 artworks installed within the Monnaie’s 18th century salons and is Cattelan’s largest exhibition in Europe to date.

The Italian artist is known for incredibly realistic sculptures that are clever, satirical, and often irreverent. A primary example is La Nona Ora, a life-sized effigy of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteor. The work has inspired controversy since it was first exhibited in 1999 at the Kunsthalle Basel, and is no less provocative today.

The current exhibition takes its title, Not Afraid of Love, from an elephant draped in a white cloth – a literal elephant in the room. Other works include Untitled, a resin and wax version of Cattelan that peeks out from a hole in the floor; All, an installation of nine draped bodies sculpted from Carrara marble; and Him, a diminutive and penitent-looking Adolf Hitler. Many of the installations are witty, but not superficial, with subversive and multiple potent social narratives.

“Humor is a way of communicating to overcome the barrier of shyness. It is a smoke signal to convey an important message that would actually be less effective if I expressed it literally. Irony often conceals a dramatic moment.”

Cattelan’s period of retirement ended in early 2016 with a site-specific work, America, at the Guggenheim. For what the museum calls a “participatory” and “ongoing project,” Cattelan replaced the toilet in a fourth floor restroom with a fully functioning version cast in 18-karat gold. It’s completely absurd, and it’s also a brilliant reference to the current state of politics, economics, and the excesses of the art world.

The aesthetics of Not Afraid of Love benefit from the Neoclassical architecture of the Monnaie de Paris, and the works develop other narratives, perhaps, within a currency-producing national mint. The exhibition opened on October 21 and continues through January 8, 2017.

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Maurizio Cattelan’s installation of La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) is a life-sized effigy of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteor. First exhibited in 1999 at the Kunsthalle Basel, La Nona Ora was featured at the Royal Academy in London in 2000, and also at the Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Christie’s sold the piece in 2001 for $886,000, and a second version was auctioned by Phillips, de Pury & Company in 2004 for $3 million.

Much of the controversy that results from La Nona Ora is immediate and overt. The realistic figure of Pope John Paul II, in characteristic vestments and still clutching the Papal Cross, lies on the ground after having been crushed by a meteor. The original installation was under a shattered skylight, with the Pope beneath the meteor on a vast red carpet with shards from the skylight. The scene is quite sensational and results in a range of narrative interpretations.

The title of the work is traditionally significant in the Liturgy of the Hours of the Catholic Church, and among other things, suggests mourning and the supposed hour of Christ’s death. Beyond this, all sorts of narratives may result. Perhaps Cattelan, a Roman Catholic, suggests the calamitous degradation of the Church as a result of scandals and quickly changing social values; or perhaps he celebrates it with this extraterrestrial injury to the Pope. Because the meteor has apparently fallen from the sky – literally from the heavens – it may interpreted be that God himself has assaulted the Church. As the Pope survives and clings to the Papal Cross, perhaps he represents the Church’s eternal fortitude. Oppositely, we may conclude that he is only a man and should not be venerated.

What must be considered about each of the preceding interpretations is that they would have been unacceptable even decades earlier. Moreover, Cattelan’s installation would have never been envisioned earlier than the twentieth century and such discourse would have been really impossible.

Certainly the most notable controversy caused by this work occurred in Warsaw at the Zacheta Gallery when two members of Poland’s Parliament, Halina Nowina-Konopka and Witold Tomczak, removed the rock from atop the wax Pope and attempted to stand the figure upright. The two also led a petition with ninety members of Parliament demanding the dismissal of the gallery’s director, Anda Rottenberg. After La Nona Ora had already been seen in Basel and in London it caused quite a disturbance in Warsaw, revealing the significance of site-specificity in a Catholic-dominant country that was also the homeland of Pope John Paul II.

Notwithstanding that the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and two local priests had defended the installation, the Parliament and Catholic-majority Poland were intolerant of the installation. Tomczak suggested that Rottenberg, a Jew, should move to Israel and commission an installation of a rabbi being crushed by Yasser Arafat. As the controversy continued, she received piles of anti-Semitic hate mail and resigned from the gallery several months later. Any interpretation of the situation was divisive, resulting in Rottenberg identified as either an insensitive Catholic-basher or a victim of anti-Semitism.

President Kwasniewski and the priests had described the installation as an allegory for the Pope’s heavenly burden and Rottenberg called it “an egalitarian monument.” In an interview with Alicia Bona from Christie’s, Cattelan reflected that “what happened in Poland was a sort of upside down miracle: salvation wasn’t coming from the sky but from the earth, from the people” to save the Pope.

After the controversy seemed to have lessened in 2001, Cattelan avoided very specific interpretation of the work and modestly advised that “La Nona Ora could simply be a bad joke taken too seriously, an exercise in absurdity […] In the end it is only a piece of wax.”

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