The guy who ate the Art Basel banana breaks his silence: I made history
He digested the most famous piece of fruit Art Basel Miami Beach has likely ever seen.
On Saturday, artist David Datuna casually walked by Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” installation at the Miami Beach Convention Center, freed the quickly ripening object held by duct tape on the wall and consumed it.
“This is an art performance,” Datuna smiled in front of shocked onlookers. “I call it ‘Hungry Artist.’”
On Monday, back home in Brooklyn, the painter held a news conference about the banana-eating, captured on video and posted to his Instagram account.
Datuna said the decision to eat the banana, which had recently sold for $120,000, was spur of the moment.
The New York resident, who is originally from the country of Georgia, believes what he did was historic.
“I think this is the first one in art history when one artist eats the concept [of] another artist,” he said. “The banana is just a tool. I ate the concept of that.”
Saturday’s expensive chowdown occurred two days after the Emmanuel Perrotin art gallery sold another edition of “Comedian” for $120,000.
There are no hard feelings.
“He did not destroy the artwork. The banana is the idea,” Lucien Terras, the gallery’s director of museum relations, told the Miami Herald.
What has the most value is the perishable object’s certificate of authenticity, Terras added.
Meanwhile, Miami couple Billy and Beatrice Cox purchased the third edition of Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” for $120,000, according to a member of the Cox family.
The Cox couple, members of the family that sold Dow Jones Co. to Rupert Murdoch in 2007, originally had the same reaction as most when they saw the banana stuck to the wall of the Perrotin booth at Art Basel Miami Beach last week.
“At first they had the same reaction as other people had,” the Cox family member told the Miami Herald. “Then they fell in love with it and thought it will be a part of art history.”
The Cox couple, who have been collecting art for more than two decades, plan to loan the controversial work to a major museum in an effort to attract new generations. They also pledge to donate the work at a later date.
“We see the piece as a unicorn in the art world, and bought it to ensure that it would be accessible to the public forever, to fuel debate and provoke thoughts and emotion in a public space in perpetuity,” the Cox family stated in a press release. “At Art Basel there have been many multimillion-dollar pieces that have been bought and sold with less fanfare, yet people who usually would not have been so interested in art wanted to see ‘the banana.’ It has opened the floodgates and morphed into an important debate about the value that we place on works of art and objects in general.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2019 at 2:13 PM.
