The artist Maurizio Cattelan will be the first to tell you he does not specialize in craft. He’s not a painter or a sculptor, per se. His speciality is imaginative provocation, the art of the conceptual joke. A life-size, hyper-realistic sculpture of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteor in La Nona Ora, for example, his eyes closed in eternal sleep. A child-size model of Hitler knelt in prayer, called Him, or a privately commissioned sculpture of a woman, Betsy, huddled in a full-size refrigerator.
The 63-year-old Italian has scored mainstream headlines in recent years with pieces that take a bit very literally, ribbing wealth, power, cultural debasement and the art world’s hot air, among other targets. In 2016, he installed a functional solid-gold toilet at the Guggenheim and called it America. (The work was later stolen from Blenheim Palace, and presumably melted down.) More infamously, he duct-taped a banana to the wall at Art Basel in Miami and called it art. That piece, titled Comedian, sold for $120,000 (and has been eaten by viewers, then replaced, on multiple occasions) – an easily mocked symbol of the art market’s bullshit, a work of questionable genius or a triumphant, Duchampian performance of the modern artist’s tragicomic existence, depending on who you ask.
