Installations by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan are famously provocative, but his signature work — a banana taped to a wall — fell prey to a basic impulse: the hunger it provoked in a South Korean college student.
The art in question, Comedian, is a (frequently replaced) duct-taped banana that is meant to evoke everything from Charlie Chaplin's slapstick comedy to the fruit's status as an emblem of global trade.
