Ahead of the sale of Maurizio Cattelan's $1.5 million banana, we look at contemporary art's fascination with art that goes bad -- and how to conserve it.
One of the newsiest lots coming to auction this month is a work that made an enormous splash at Galerie Perrotin's booth at Art Basel Miami Beach five years ago: Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian (2019), a banana duct-taped to a wall. Three editions sold for between $120,000 and $150,000. A few short years later, Sotheby's New York is offering one of these pieces on the secondary market -- with a high estimate of $1.5 million, the fruit again made news headlines in and beyond the art world.
Yet Cattelan is not the first artist (nor will he likely be last) to make artwork with material that ultimately decays. From Arte Povera on, there is a long history of such work. Today, many other contemporary artists have plugged into comestibles as theme and material. These artworks, which incorporate food and other perishables, can offer unique challenges to curators, collectors, and conservators. For owners of Cattelan's piece, it's easy: they simply replenish the materials as needed, as per the artist's instructions. But it's often trickier than that.
For some other artists, the perishability of their materials is part of the very concept. Turner Prize-winning artist Jesse Darling, for example, creates lush floral bouquets in clear plastic vitrines. Over time, mold blooms on the flowers and condensation gathers on the interior of the casing. These ephemeral sculptures echo floral still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age, which served as a memento mori, or a reminder that our existence is fleeting, but unlike the genre paintings, they are not static and evidence the concept before our eyes. The conceptual piece comes with strict instructions that demand the participation of the collector or institution: the flowers must be kept in the vitrine(s) for six weeks in the case of an acquisition, or for the duration of an exhibition. Additionally, buyers must provide an image of the work upon installation, to be added to the archives.
Also working with flowers is Dutch artist Willem de Rooij. At art school in the 1990s, he and collaborator Jeroen De Rijke sought ways to poke fun at "rigid conceptual orthodoxy," he said in an email discussing his bouquets, of which he has made 18 since 2002.
Consisting of a list of flowers, a set of instructions, and a certificate of authenticity, his works, too, nod partly to the Dutch still life tradition. "Ideas around ecology and waste play a role," he explains, adding that while they may appear alive, cut flowers are already dead. And, since flowers have been genetically engineered, they are for him as much cultural as natural. Each bouquet, says the artist, "is supposed to be refreshed or touched up roughly once a week, depending on the quality of the flowers and the climatic circumstances of the exhibition space."
These works very much aim at a precise formal beauty, but also bring in ideas from outside that frame: they can be based on "philosophical or political tropes," the artist explains. A 2003 bouquet, for example, came with the text of an essay co-authored by De Rooij that deals with subjects including Islamic fundamentalism, European racism, and populist nationalism.
The Nuts and Bolts of Conserving Perishable Art
Works that incorporate perishable art are an obvious challenge to the tenets of art in a traditional sense, which is meant to be preserved and maintained in its original form for decades or even millennia. One can imagine that this might be a nightmare from the perspective of insurance.
"A Valuable Articles policy excludes loss from gradual deterioration, inherent vice, and wear and tear," said Aon Private Risk Management's vice president and director of art and collections, Blythe Hogan, in an email. "Coverage is available for artworks with ephemeral materials and considered on a case-by-case basis, but these would still be subject to the aforementioned exclusions."
Enter art conservators. These professionals, including New York's Suzanne Siano, have treated artworks made of materials such as chewing gum (she cites artists Dan Colen, Adam McEwen, and Maurizio Savini), cereal or toothpaste (both Tom Friedman), or chocolate and lard (Janine Antoni). Humidity can cause the sugars in chewing gum to melt; cold can make chocolate bloom; light can cause cereal to fade. "They all require a level of maintenance and care that works made of traditional art materials generally do not," said Siano.
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The experts at New York Art Conservation have worked to conserve pieces including croissants and tempura. "Conversely," pointed out managing director Katherine Bel in an email, "in the works of artists like Dieter Roth and Daniel Spoerri for example, the degradation of the material is an expected or intended aspect of the artwork."
As you might guess from the above, the first rule of treating such artworks may be that there are no rules. Decisions must be faithful to the artwork, conservator Christian Scheidemann says, but the artworks vary wildly. "It's like a zoo," he said in an interview. "You're dealing with a lot of animals and they need their own food and special treatment."
There are plenty of guidelines, though, such as can be found in the book From Marble to Chocolate: the Conservation of Modern Sculpture (1995); the 2022 volume resulting from the conference "Living Matter: The Preservation of Biological Materials in Contemporary Art," co-organized by the Getty Conservation Institute; and, forthcoming in 2025, Lexikon der Lebensmittel als Kunsmaterial (Lexicon of Food as Art Material).
A Test of Taste
Artworks incorporating food are so plentiful that Scheidemann reels off a number off the top of his head: Joseph Beuys's Capri Battery (1985), in which a lemon supplies power for a light bulb, symbolizing how nature provides; Sigmar Polke's Kartoffelhaus (Potato House), (1967-90), a miniature house built of wooden slats with tubers attached, another allegory for endless creation; and Zoe Leonard's Strange Fruit (1992-97), in which fruit skins are sutured together as a metaphor for healing amid the AIDS crisis.
Scheidemann was profiled as "The Art Doctor" in the New Yorker, which noted that he was revered for his work with organic materials. When called upon by Robert Gober to preserve his Bag of Donuts (1989), for example, the conservator subjected the sweet treats to acetone baths, which caused them to lose some mass, and then replaced the losses with an acrylic resin.
These pieces can test museum committees' taste for risk-taking, as Ann Temkin, then a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, found when she proposed Strange Fruit for acquisition in 1998. She later recalled dryly that "It was an unusual work to present to a board."
They present challenges to curators who install them, too. When the Rhode Island School of Design Museum presented Beuys's Capri Battery in a 2009-10 show, they drilled vent holes in its display case, but mold still grew so quickly that they sometimes had to replace the fruit every few days, according to the museum's interim chief curator and contemporary art curator Dominic Molon.
Another conceptual approach is to make use of the materials. In an untitled, undated piece on view at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2020 exhibition "Fruits, Vegetables; Fruit and Vegetable Salad," New York artist Darren Bader displayed examples of what he called "nature's impeccable sculpture" on plinths, as you might an artwork. Before they became overripe, chefs made them into a salad for visitors. One connoisseur rendered a mixed review under the headline "I Ate the Worst Salad of My Life in the Name of Art."
Other artists consume their own work -- or at least chew on it. Bahamian-born American artist Janine Antoni is legendary for Gnaw (1992), in which she gnawed away at twin 600-pound cubes of chocolate and lard, spat it out, and created boxes of chocolate and tubes of lipstick from the chewed matter.
For Lick and Lather (1993), she created self-portrait busts in chocolate and soap, then licked the former and took the latter into the shower, partially effacing their features. The works "highlight the conflicted, but intimate, relationship that many people have with their surface appearance," Antoni has said.
Asked what she has learned from years of showing that piece, Antoni shared a surprising tale.
"I have so many stories to tell you I don't know where to start," she said over email. "I think the thing I am most surprised about when it comes to Lick and Lather is that the chocolate busts have been bitten into at three different venues in three different countries.
"Of course, I chose the medium of chocolate because I thought it would elicit desire in the viewers," she added, "but I was shocked that they would succumb to those desires."