The Comedian artistic phenomenon of 2019 amid controversy and provocation.
A banana attached with tape on a wall and it's already news, as well as an avalanche of controversy and rivers of words on social media, complete with sneers and re-proposals of the work in a new key. 'gastronomic variety'.
Maurizio Cattelanis known to have a predilection for desecration. His 'middle finger' stands out in Piazza Affari in Milan in all its vigour, without forgetting the golden toilet or the statue of Pope John Paul II hit by a meteorite. All the way to Comedian, the banana, valued and sold for $120,000, presented, after fifteen years of the artist's 'silence', at the stand of the Perrotin Gallery at Art Basel Miami which not only gained widespread media coverage worldwide, but also divided the critics.
Call it conceptual art or the eccentric provocation of an artist accustomed to postmodern language: the fact is that the 'Cattelan case' has crossed all generations, geographies and media in a disruptive and transversal manner, giving everyone their say. A number of authoritative voices in critical journalism have dwelt on the author's intention to launch a sarcastic and provocative slap in the face of today's art market, now much closer to comedy than to the noble expression of its origins, increasingly devoted to business deals for a capricious, ignorant and affluent target.
A comedy that actually has more tragic implications than one imagines, with art that cannot detach itself from money and buyers interested more in the value shown
of the work than to its inherent meaning or message. An art denuded of its function, in short. And so, it is easy to understand how, behind the phenomenon of the year, at which we all first marvelled and then laughed, there hides, like the Horatian smile, a bitterness that has perhaps already melted away among the millions of posts on social networks.
While the only consolation lies in the fact that the role of the artist, the authentic and perhaps unheeded cassandra of an era that does not give art its due value, will continue in its thankless task of reacting to the degradation in which the human being is entangled.
A reflection, perhaps, on the fact that art is now ephemeral, lost in the meanders of a web in which all that is now is already past? Who knows... And why the banana? A references to the pop imagery of the 1950s or rather the representation of an unequivocal monolith for a humanity "monkey"victim of its own regression and primitiveness?
In the glossy world of art, a banana comes as a gun pointed at the pseudo-intellectual world or, according to other voices of critics, as a boomerang, judging Cattelan's gesture made at an art fair almost 'out of place', if the aim was to shake culture from its foundations.
What is certain is that Cattelan's banana found its best echo in the successor gesture of David Datuna who, by eating it, grinded 300,000 views on his Instagram profile alone, being dubbed as 'Hungry Artist'.
In short, the work itself has lost its importance to become, perhaps, a mega social performance, trapped in a larger network, that of the spectacularisation of a gesture.
Yet taken at its essence, that very spectacle almost unequivocally represents the way of doing art by CattelanIt is a spectacle within a spectacle, in which the director skilfully leads us, the spectators, more or less involved, into a world that is coloured by nuances of varying intensity, depending on our sensitivity, our ability to reflect, our desire to go beyond mere appearance. We are, perhaps, that banana stuck to the wall, compressed in a tape from which we can only free ourselves if we have the courage to escape from the grip of a contemporaneity that, let's face it, is perhaps beginning to cling to us.
In the gap between the elitism of the ultra-rich collectors and the extreme simplicity of those who think that Ligabue is only the rock singer from Emilia, the banana brings everyone together indiscriminately, admonishing us of the ephemeral nature and the rottenness of our thinking. It remains there, forcing us into a confrontation with ourselves that is perhaps too hard to bear, so much so that, in some cases, it is better to devour everything and make the evidence disappear.
