Art that’s good enough to eat

As the New York modern and contemporary auctions come to a close, one story in particular has captured public attention. The art world, and the world in general, are being driven bananas by Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) – a work made of, well, a banana duct-taped to a wall. (It’s been a big week for bananas, with leaked emails having emerged detailing the intense phobia of the fruit suffered by a Swedish government minister. Rakewell apologises for any distress this article might cause.) Sotheby’s sold the work, which may or may not be a satire aimed at the art market, for $6.2m with fees. It is not so much the price, however, which excites Rakewell, but what the buyer has said he will do with the work.

Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto entrepreneur who bought the work, has said that ‘in the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honouring its place in both art history and popular culture’. Your roving correspondent is unclear how digestion can honour art history but looks forward to the result, while also hoping that a period spent in Customs and Excise does not result in the fruit disintegrating into a rotten, mashed version of its former self.

Mr Sun is not the first art collector to put an art object to use in a surprising way. Liu Yiqian, fresh from making a fortune on the stock exchange (though he seems to make much of having been a taxi driver), bought the Meiyintang ‘chicken cup’ in 2014 from Sotheby’s, which was described by the auction house – in terms that just pulled back from hyperbole – as ‘arguably the most celebrated porcelain throughout the centuries’. This cup, made during the Chenghua era (1465–87), entered Mr Liu’s collection for $36m. He promptly decided to use the cup for a nice brew.

Perhaps the actions of Sun and Liu are in fact markers of respect. Artists have long used edible materials in their work – in Urs Fischer’s Faules Fundament (Rotten Foundation)! (2017), the natural process of decay is precisely the point. Viewers of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) were encouraged to eat the sweets that made up the artwork. And then there is the work of Dieter Roth. In the 1960s Roth incorporated chocolate into his work and started to make sculptures out of bread. Again, decay and the time it took was part of the work, though, as Rakewell can attest, this has posed something of a problem for the institutions where the work is kept. Rakewell once saw a Roth being restored, not for any fading of colour or form but because weevils were working their way through the sculpture.

Perhaps Justin Sun is being neither naive or disrespectful by eating the $6m artwork he has just bought. It might be that he is simply adding a new layer of meaning. Or maybe Comedian has another joke still to tell.