The very title of the piece suggests Cattelan himself likely didn’t intend for it to be taken seriously. But Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, said it is worth thinking about the context.

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Cattelan premiered the work at an art fair, visited by well-off art collectors, where Comedian was sure to get a lot of attention on social media. That might mean the art constituted a dare, of sorts, to the collectors to invest in something absurd, she said.

If Comedian is just a tool for understanding the insular, capitalist, art-collecting world, Cooper Jones said, “it’s not that interesting of an idea.”

But she thinks it might go beyond poking fun at rich people.

Cattelan is often thought of a “trickster artist,” she said. “But his work is often at the intersection of the sort of humour and the deeply macabre. He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”

And there is a dark side to the banana, a fruit with a history entangled with imperialism, labor exploitation and corporate power.

“It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana,” Cooper Jones said. If “Comedian” is about making people think about their moral complicity in the production of objects they take for granted, then it’s “at least a more useful tool or it’s at least an additional sort of place to go in terms of the questions that this work could be asking,” she said.

Comedian hits the block around the same time that Sotheby’s is also auctioning one of the famed paintings in the Water Lilies series by the French impressionist Claude Monet, with an expected value of around $US60 million.

When asked to compare Cattelan’s banana to a classic like Monet’s Nymphéas, Galperin says impressionism was not considered art when the movement began.

“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled,” Galperin said.

AP