Cattelan’s banana taped to a wall was a hit at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, when it sold for $120,000.
The American artist, Joe Morford, told a Miami court that Cattelan had stolen the idea from his own 2001 creation, Banana and Orange, which features plastic replicas of the fruits duct taped to two green panels, and which he showed in his native California.
However, Judge Robert N Scola, Jr, a US district judge for the southern district of Florida, ruled that the similarities between the works were insufficient, and Morford’s claim that Cattelan might have seen his work and been influenced by it unconvincing, to pursue allegations of copyright infringement.
“Comedian simply contains two (sic) many differences from Banana and Orange: the banana used, the angle at which it is placed, the method by which it is taped to the background, the background itself and the exacting standards that Cattelan developed for Comedian’s display,” judge Scola’s ruling concluded.
“To find otherwise would further limit the already finite number of ways in which a banana may be legally taped to a wall without infringing on Morford’s work.”
In Morford’s work (above right), the artist duct-taped a plastic orange and a plastic banana to panels hung on a wall. While Judge Scola acknowledged the work to have 'substantial similarity' to Cattelan's Comedian, it did not constitute copyright infringement.
On at least two occasions the banana in Comedian has been taken off the wall and eaten by people.
Art world website artnewspaper.com reported that during Art Basel Miami Beach, performance artist David Datuna removed Comedian from the wall and ate the banana in a piece he dubbed Hungry Artist (2019), which formed the basis of a solo exhibition in New York the following year.
Earlier this year, art student Noh Huyn-soo, from Seoul while visiting the Leeum Museum of Art’s Cattelan exhibition, took the banana, ate it and taped the peel back on the wall.
The aspiring artist reportedly said: “Isn’t it taped there to be eaten?”.
ANSA
