- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
- Click here to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
- Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)
Editor's Note: Camilo Egaña is the Camilo driver . The opinions expressed in this article are exclusive to the author.
(CNN) - A banana attached to the wall with duct tape has sold for $ 120,000 at Art Basel Miami Beach, the Miami Art Fair.
It's a banana like any other, bought at a grocery store in Miami. Although the work does not include instructions for when the fruit begins to decompose.
The Italian Maurizio Cattelan is responsible for the piece entitled "Comedian."
They say that the man is joking but that the banana is not a joke; in fact he was weighing it for a year.
Cattelan is considered among the most important artists of contemporary art.
And since it is not lavished in art fairs, it has been the sensation in that fair in Miami that brings together the most picturesque, the most outdated, the most ridiculous, the most brilliant and the richest, able to buy something that matches another something they have in their homes on Lake Como or Manhattan.
The good thing about visiting that fair is that one is so bland that it seems sinless.
A couple of years ago I came across an artist who, instead of speaking, wheezed. Say a kind of whistle, like an infinite one. But he was very attentive to what one was trying to ask him.
When the American writer Tom Wolfe made fun of the Miami Art Fair in his novel Bloody Miami, more than one - but not many more because who reads today - put the cry in the sky.
But that is one of the best moments of the book because Miami is a shameless city. Warm and generous, but shameless.
Martín Caparrós, the Argentine writer and journalist, says that in Miami all the money is new: it is exhibited, strutted, presumed. And that always shows.
I have seen at the Miami Art Fair subjects that approach a painting or an installation, with the same greediness they do before a Ferrari: salivating.
And they get elated when someone who passes by tells them that a banana, although rotting, can enter the history of art. And only they will have that broken banana.
According to the Artnet art market website, two of the three editions of those bananas attached to a wall have already been sold, and the last one costs $ 150,000.
It must be a thing of globalization. Or climate change, who knows.
Art Basel