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The work and its meaning in contemporary art.
The museum reported the theft against unknown persons and immediately replaced the fruit, in accordance with the procedures stipulated by the work, which contemplates its perishable nature and reiterability. This is not an isolated incident: already in 2025 a visitor had removed and consumed the banana, confirming the material vulnerability and, at the same time, the media predictability of the installation.
The Comedian affair is part of a now well-known trajectory: since its appearance in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, the work has taken on a more discursive than objectual dimension, transforming itself into a device capable of generating attention, controversy, and economic valorization. The subsequent sale for millions of dollars and the episode in which the work was eaten by the buyer are not marginal incidents, but coherent moments of the same performative dynamic, in which the circulation of the work coincides with its continuous symbolic reactivation.
In this framework, the banana is never really the center of the work: its status is deliberately precarious, subordinated to a system of certification, instructions, and authorizations that guarantee its reproducibility. The perishability of the fruit is not a side effect, but a structural condition that makes explicit the tension between matter and idea, between consumption and permanence. After all, the use of the organic in art history is never accidental: I think of the lettuce leaf in Anselmo’s work, replaced every morning by museum staff before opening. If the caducity of the leaf was for Anselmo symbolic of transformation and of a more living vision of art, for Cattelan the meaning is harsher: in fact, his poetics lies within a conceptual horizon in which the object is reduced to a pretext, while the core of the work lies in its ability to trigger public, media and institutional reactions. His works act as short circuits: decontextualized everyday elements that produce a perceptual gap, often ironic or disturbing, and that challenge traditional categories of aesthetic value. In this sense, the figure of the artist appears inherently paradoxical: he criticizes from within a system-that of art and the market-that simultaneously legitimizes and amplifies it. Comedian is no exception, but rather concentrates this dynamic in an elemental and immediately recognizable form.
The story of America, the 18-karat gold toilet installed first at the Guggenheim and then at Blenheim Palace, also fits into the same logic. Conceived as a reflection on the excess and commodification of luxury, the object was actually used by the public before being stolen in 2019 and probably dismantled to recover its material value. A fate that, in an almost ironic way, relocates the work within the economic logic it was intended to question.
Overall, Cattelan’s works seem to oscillate constantly between presence and disappearance, between object and event, between symbolic value and material reduction. And it is precisely this instability, rather than an accidental consequence, that appears to be the real driving force behind their effectiveness: not so much what they represent as what they continue to make happen around them. It is not surprising, then, this latest report of theft from the Pompidou. Indeed, in a sense, the return to the society of which they themselves are fruits can only make sense for these works. And in the end, the only one who really gains is the one who manages to turn the short-circuit into symbolic capital: Cattelan.
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