Sarah Abdin
When the Italian artist Maurizio Catalan unveiled the banana hanging on the wall at the "Art Basel Miami Beach" exhibition, a great media chaos erupted in Miami, especially after selling the first version of the banana for $ 120,000, and selling the second copy for $ 150,000.
Crowds scrambled to see the banana hanging on the walls, which prompted the exhibition management to put a velvet rope between the banana and the fans, especially after the performance artist David Datuna and the banana charges came claiming that he was a hungry artist, but the administration was ready with a certificate attached to the banana, explaining that it can be replaced whenever needed .
Great controversy
Throughout the days there were many funny, strange, and philosophical explanations about the sale of the banana hanging on the wall, and the idea was reproduced in various forms, and people began hanging various items on the walls with the same silver sticker, photographed and raised on social media, and one of the food product companies used the same idea as advertising For their products, some artists repainted banana as a graffiti on the street walls and metro stations.
After all the commotion, Billy and Beatrice Cox Malka Banana issued a statement about it, describing the work as a unique work, closer to the famous soup cans produced by Andy Warhol in 1962, and the couple expressed their intention to donate artwork at the end of the museum, saying that even people not interested in art wanted Seeing a banana, which opened the doors to important discussions about the value of artworks, and the value of things in general.
Although banana is considered a threat to decay and degradation, Emmanuel Perotin, the founder of the exhibition, stressed that the true value of the work lies in the certificate of authenticity, which includes a guide for installation, saying, "All artwork costs a lot of money, and owners buy an idea and a certificate."
The idea as an art
In a statement released by the exhibition's management, on CNN, Catalan said that every time he traveled, he would bring a banana and hang it on the wall of his hotel room to find inspiration. Two blocks of banana made several models of bronze and bronze coated, and the last time he returned to the initial idea of the real banana.
But the question is how to buy and sell bananas, and how can bananas be a work of art? Here we can take back the beginnings of conceptual art with Marcel Duchamp's "fountain" art, when he brought a ceramic urinal and signed it under a pseudonym and displayed it as a work of art more than a hundred years ago, to establish the idea, concept and mutual play between the artist and the public and how to make art from the beginning.
Catalan tries to stir controversy again, especially after the rise of the various currents of contemporary art, which establishes the idea that anything an artist makes is art, but does art have to be a concrete product? Or is it just an original idea regardless of implementation?
In the present era, and with the growth of artistic experimentation, artists began resisting the traditional forms of art, and artistic ideas expanded amazingly, and here the Banana Catalan can be considered a smart idea if we decide to take it seriously and think about it seriously, especially with the artist's comic devouring her performance, to turn It all comes down to something like a full performance performance.
In other words, banana is not art, but art is the strangeness of the idea, sale, and controversy over the evaluation of art and its value, and about the freedom that contemporary art demands for itself, and its desire to be free from the rules; they are all the most important controversial ideas raised by the banana Catalan.
Some critics go in another direction, believing that Catalan is trying to ridicule the strange forms of contemporary art, and criticize capitalism that art is subject to sale and purchase, as long as there is a group of wealthy people who can finally buy anything, especially with the growing interest in work, his idea, and the buzz that The media raised her about the show from its inception until its end.