Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” a conceptual artwork comprising a banana stuck to a wall with duct tape, sold on Wednesday for $6.24 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.
Sotheby’s revealed that Justin Sun, a Chinese collector and founder of a cryptocurrency platform, had acquired the work.
He has proceeded to eat the banana !
But, the first recorded instance of “shock art” happened in 1917.
The man who did it was Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dadaism, and conceptual art.
He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as the troika that defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts
Duchamp walked into a plumbing supply store in New York City and selected a Bedfordshire-style urinal.
Later he proceeded to sign it “R.Mutt,” named it ‘Fountain’, and called it art.
Duchamp anonymously submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists— which he served as the founder and director of—for exhibition.
The society was forward-thinking and away from the highbrow elitist definitions of art but it refused to display the piece.
“R. Mutt” was trashed.
Only one single photograph of it, by Alfred Stieglitz, survives.
The point Duchamp was making, though, lived on.
“Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder”.
There is no “acceptable basis for defining art”
Anything is serious art or ridiculous irreverence, depending only on how one perceives it.