When appraising art, the most relevant comparable sales are usually those by the same artist. If there are no appropriate comps, one may, by necessity, look to other artists. Find yourself appraising a Mantegna painting with no useful auction sales in 20+ years, you might look at the recent Botticelli sales to gain an understanding of present demand for significant Italian Renaissance paintings.
Doing such is relatively uncommon when appraising contemporary art, particularly by well-known artists whose works sell regularly at auction and privately. Yet, if I were appraising Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, the duct-taped banana that sold this week at Sotheby’s, New York for $6.2 million against an estimate of $1-1.5M, I would do just that.
Comedian is hardly alone within Cattelan’s oeuvre to trade in shock value, not even among works that have sold publicly. Known for his 18-karat gold toilet, America, created for the Guggenheim in 2016, Cattelan’s auction record was set the same year when, that May, one of three editions of Him (2001), a slightly under-life-size sculpture of Hitler sold for $17,189,000 for at Christie’s, NY. And yet, chilling as it may have been, this sculpture (an edition of which sold to Holocaust survivor Stefan Edlis) caused no great media spectacle, nor, perhaps more fundamentally, did it cogently pose any essential questions about the status of art itself.
It was not another Cattelan, but rather a Banksy that had me convinced that Comedian would perform far beyond its estimate, and enormously above its primary-market realized price of $120,000 at Perrotin’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018. The appreciation rate of 50x seems about right given the sentiment that it tapped, as well as the attendant press, now coupled with deft marketing.
The best comparable is, in my view, the Banksy, formerly known as Girl with Balloon, which sold, considerably above estimate, for $1,364,669, at Sotheby’s London; upon hammering, the painting dropped and partially shredded. The owner kept the work, and the stunt became an instant media sensation. The shredded Banksy was offered again just three years later, again at Sotheby’s London, this time with a lofty estimate of £4,000,000 - £6,000,000 ($ 5,473,340 - $ 8,210,010), and it made multiples, fetching, with buyer’s premium £18,582,000 ($ 25,426,401), a new record for the artist.
Notoriety sells, without question. But why does a work become notorious? The commonalities extend beyond mere shock. Cattelan’s conceptual modified-readymade and Banksy’s shredded painting share tropes of self-destruction and decomposition, each updating concepts explored by artists for generations. Further, both fundamentally question the meaning and limits of what constitutes a work of art. For these reasons, I consider Love is in the Bin to be a pertinent comp for Comedian, arguably the most pertinent — and its repeat(-ish) sale in 2021 for 18 times higher than the 2018 sale is what caused me to believe that Comedian would soar as it did.