Actor (2019), a sculptural intervention by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan that consists of a banana taped to the gallery wall, has lost none of its a-peel. On April 27, an art student from Seoul National University who was visiting the Cattelan exhibition WE at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul removed the banana from the wall, ate it, then stuck the skin to the wall.
The student, later identified as Noh Huyn-soo, told the Korean channel KBS that “damaging a work of modern art could also be (interpreted as a kind of) work of art”, according to Herald of Korea. Noh told museum workers that he had skipped breakfast that day and was hungry. He added: “Isn’t it saved there to be eaten?”
Video of the incident shows him eating the job with minimal protest and no intervention from museum staff. During his exhibition at the museum, ActorThe banana would be replaced every two to three days. Informed of the incident, Cattelan said BBC News“No problem at all.”
It’s not the first time another artist has grasped the potential for interactivity in Cattelan’s irreverent work. During his first public exhibition at the Art Basel fair in Miami Beach in 2019, the performer David Datuna did the same ate the bananaqualifying his act of performance, entitled hungry artist. It became the focal point of his solo exhibition the following February at Ca’d Oro Gallery in New York.
three editions of Actor, which sparked a global media frenzy – with reactions to the artwork ranging from humor and memes to outrage and outrage – sold for $120,000 during Art Basel in Miami Beach. The following year, one of these editions was donated to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It is not known who lent the edition featured in Maurizio Cattelan: US (until July 16) at the Leeum Museum of Art, but the work is obviously still ripe for comedy.
