December 11, 2019
Vandal destroys $120,000 art piece
Vandal destroys 0,000 art piece
The piece, which had originally been procured from a nearby supermarket and adhered to a wall with duct tape, personally, by the esteemed world-famous artist in the Emmanuel Perrotin’s outer gallery of the Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition in Florida, was pried loose, peeled open, and then devoured in front of shocked onlookers.
Peggy Leboeuf, a partner at Perrotin Gallery, quickly called the police and 4 Miami Beach officers were dispatched to the scene to investigate the act of public vandalism, caught on tape, and to press charges against the culprit, Georgian-born artist David Datuna.
In a statement Mr. Datuna said ‘I think this is the first time in history where one artist eats the concept of another artist and calls it ‘performance art’, he said, ‘ I explained to the officer in charge that the banana was just a tool, and I ate that concept, but the integrity of that idea still remained in my lower abdomen for another few hours and if they really wanted it back I would happily oblige and take strong laxatives to expedite it’s return in diversified state for public exhibition ‘, but the banana was quickly replaced by the Gallery owners and all charges were dropped.
According to Galerie Perrotin, the conceptualisation of the Banana was actually more than a year in the making. The original artist concocted several rough drafts – including bananas cast in resin and bronze – before settling on the bona fide fruit.
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The yellow curvilinear icon sought to subtly polarise a collective subconscious on the convergence of art with social interaction in order to engage with the participant to focus on the acquiescence of frivolous excess, characterised and defined by the very perimeter of it’s own public exhibition space where it successfully communicated a visually arresting array of mental stimuli through unwritten dialogue with its subjects. While Maurizio had wrestled with the concept of depravity and moral decay on one hand, given this critically acclaimed masterpiece was literally dying before a grim-faced adorer of the artist’s very eyes, and in real time with a certain interactive honesty and benevolence that some would say connects with nature on a spiritual level. He also seeks to shine a spotlight towards the more aloof and disjointed members of society, brandishing metaphysical scythes of surplus cash whom can afford to slice off the moral equivalent of 1600 metric tons of bananas and substantive sustenance that could otherwise help a starving foreign nation to cope with malnourished children to survive another day in another world. On just a whim, the splurging of excess riches into a solitary piece of worthless decomposing fruit, makes an emphatic statement for polemical provenance and laudable conversational rhetoric that helps stimulate the neurons of an otherwise brainless industry, and to wilfully summon the nod of begrudging approval and artistic appraisal from the perceived peers and groundbreaking connoisseurs of impeccably good, yet edgy, taste striving for a whole set of new rules and standards within the industry. An Art Critic familiar with the works said earlier.
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Ironically the piece is rumoured to have doubled in value since the incident, throwing the art-world into disarray with speculators declaring a copy of the police report could well be worth up to $100,000 if sold as part of the collection.