Artist Maurizio Cattelan’s ridiculous taped banana is back in the news. On Thursday, April 27, art student Noh Huyn-soo from Seoul National University in Korea ate an edition of “Actor(2019) exhibited in an exhibition of Cattelan’s works at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.
Huyn-soo’s friend recorded the incident and posted it on instagram. Dressed in a suit, the student removes the banana, takes a few bites, then sticks the empty skin on the wall.
Huyn-soo said he skipped breakfast and was hungry, but later admitted the performance was more thoughtful.
“Damage to a modern work of art can also be [interpreted as a kind of] work of art,” he said in an interview with the Herald of Korea. The banana is changed every two or three days and the Leeum Museum of Art would not complain. (The museum has not yet responded to Hyperallergicimmediate request for comments).
If it’s deja vu, it’s because an almost identical incident happened four years ago at Art Basel Miami Beach. “Comedian” had sold three times and fetched a price tag of $120,000. The absurdity of the installation – and the art world’s apparent acceptance of it – made the work go viral. Then the late performance artist David Datuna ate the banana, and it also went viral.
Huyn-soo seems to have ripped a page straight from Datuna’s manual. “It’s performance art… starving artist,” Datuna said in 2019.
Cattelan is represented by top-notch mega gallery Perrotin, but his lagging work has repeatedly derided the art world. In 2016, Cattelan created “America”, a fully functional toilet in solid gold worth approximately $6 million; three years later, the works were stolen from an exhibition at Blenheim Palace in England, where it was installed in an actual bathroom and presented to visitors for actual use. Golden toilets are still on the loose.
In 2020, an anonymous donor offered their copy of “Comédien” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since the artwork is made of a relatively fresh banana and normal tape, the donation included the reproduction rights and an incredibly long 14-page instruction manual.
