Description
WE’RE GOING BANANAS!
The news item made headlines across the world. A banana duct-taped to the wall of the French gallery Perrotin by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan at the international art fair Art Basel in Miami was sold for 120,000 dollars. No matter that the piece, entitled Comedian, was perishable, because the essential was the “concept“ and all it took was replacing the fruit to renew it ! The reactions were myriad. Some saw the expression of a contemporary art market definitively cut adrift from reality. Others evoked the ghosts of Marcel Duchamp and Magritte, affirming “Ceci n’est pas une banane“. Many, finally, simply recognized a good joke by a specialist in the genre, to whom we also owe the creation of massive golden toilets (estimated at over 5 million dollars and stolen last September) and Him, a statue of kneeling Hitler valued at 15 million dollars
!What is certain, is that all artists seek to provoke, in both the sense of pushing us to reflect and react, put also of sparking desire. The Impressionists, Dalí, Cézanne… were all, in their time, “provocateurs“, before ultimately achieving wide recognition. Bertolt Brecht declared that “Provocation is a way of putting reality back on its feet“. What reality is hiding behind Cattelan’s banana? To each viewer his own opinion.
Gabrielle Gauthier et Christian Charreyre
Editors in Chief
