Conceptual Art / Minimal Art
Frank Stella: "What you see is what you see".
A banana attached to a white wall with Duct Tape, the work is titled: "Comedian" and was created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
Anyone can stick a banana on the wall. But this is conceptual art.
"At the time, Cattelan was thinking of a sculpture shaped like a banana," a statement on the work reads. "Every time he travelled, he brought a banana and hung it in his hotel room to find inspiration. He made several models: first in resin, then in bronze and painted bronze, and finally in the original idea of a real banana."
The work was shown at Art Basel Miami and cost $120,000, for this reason, it quickly garnered media attention and heated many discussions. But then there was a scandal, another artist - David Datuna - took the banana off the wall and ate it.
Some works can only be understood through an examination of the artist and his thinking.
At the centre of this art form is the idea of a purely intellectual conception. It is only documented through written notes, photographs, diagrams, and calculations and exists only through thought-associative processes in the viewer's imagination.