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Neighborhood News: The Blockbuster Banana
New York magazine
|Dec 2-15, 2024
Maurizio Cattelan's 2019 art-prank piece sells for $6.24 million at Sotheby's, becomes snack.
SEVEN YEARS AGO, as New York neared its 50th anniversary, we asked 50 artists to create celebratory posters. For one of them, Maurizio Cattelan photographed a banana stuck to a wall with bright-red tape. It was, Cattelan told us, partly a riff on New Yorkers' patched-with-duct-tape living quarters. ("In my apartment, the pipes are held together with it," he said.) In 2019, he created a similar work, with silver-gray tape and titled Comedian, in an edition of three. At the Art Basel Miami fair, they sold for $120,000 to $150,000 each. What buyers got was not merely
This story is from the Dec 2-15, 2024 edition of New York magazine.
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