Curious visitor that this man who, on Saturday, “eaten” a banana, belonging to a work estimated at more than a million euros exhibited at the Center Pompidou-Metz, according to information from the Republican Lorrain, confirmed to the Parisian by the museum.
Saturday, “a visitor ate the banana being part of the work Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan, ”deplores the Center Pompidou. The surveillance team then intervened “quickly and calmly”. Then the work was reinstalled in the process, adds the museum, which specifies that the incident “in no way altered the integrity of the work or the smooth running of the exhibition, which remains fully accessible to the public”.
This is because the famous fruit tasted by the visitor “is only an perishable element, regularly replaced according to a precise protocol defined by the artist”, details the museum.
A bit ironic, the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan “regrets that we confuse the fruit with the work itself: rather than eating banana with his skin and scotch the visitor has been content to consume the fruit”.
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“COMEDIAN” is an emblematic conceptual work, exhibited for the first time at Art Basel Miami in 2019. She had at the time defeated the chronicle and aroused a keen debate on what can be considered as a work of art. Last November, one of its editions was estimated at more than a million euros by the Sotheby’s house. His buyer, an investor in cryptocurrencies, had won him for $ 6 million and eaten him.
Maurizio Cattelan is used to controversies. The 64 -year -old artist, known for his provocative and humorous works, had installed functional toilet in solid gold in the Guggenheim in New York, two months before the first election of Donald Trump, in 2016. The curator of the museum had proposed the work denouncing the inequalities and baptized “America” to the president who wanted to borrow a painting by Van Gogh.