Cattelan, Maurizio

Maurizio Cattelan, (born January 6, 1960, Padua, Italy), Italian conceptual artist known for his subversive prankish displays.

A self-taught artist, Cattelan began his career designing furniture but turned to sculpture and conceptual art in the early 1990s and quickly garnered a reputation for a sense of humour and a penchant for blurring the distinction between art and reality. He described himself as a “lazy” artist and told The Guardian newspaper that “I don’t do anything.” Some of his actions backed up the latter claim. In 1992, for example, he assembled a group of donors to award him a $10,000 grant that stipulated that he not exhibit any artwork for one year. At the 1993 Venice Biennale, he made a statement (and a profit) by subletting his exhibit space to a perfume company. At an exhibition in Turin, Italy, he knotted bedsheets together and hung them out a window, giving the impression that he had left the building.

In truth, however, Cattelan did plenty of creating. In 1999 he exhibited La nona ora, which depicted Pope John Paul II having just been struck by a meteorite. That same year, at a London gallery, he displayed a miniature replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, located in Washington, D.C., that had engraved on it the score of every football (soccer) match lost by the English national team. His commemoration of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, Frankie and Jamie (2002), showed two wax figures of New York police officers standing upside down.

Cattelan’s 2011 retrospective at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, where the artist suspended his work from the centre of the building’s iconic rotunda, opened to mixed reviews but nonetheless confirmed his place in the contemporary art world—as did the fact that his work often commanded millions at auction. Some, however, still questioned whether Cattelan was a legitimate artist or just a con man, and that issue pervades the documentary Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back (2016).

Despite causing much controversy with his satiric critique of the art world and of society in general, Cattelan deftly managed—for the most part—to enthrall rather than enrage his audience and his peers. Indeed, his America sculpture, a functioning solid-gold toilet, which was installed in a restroom at the Guggenheim from 2016 to 2017, drew long lines from good-humoured visitors and caused a social media frenzy. The artwork, estimated to be worth more than $4 million, was later stolen from a restroom at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, while on exhibition in 2019.

Meanwhile, the conceptual piece Comedian caused a sensation when it was displayed at the 2019 Art Basel Miami, an annual international art fair. Simply consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall, the work sold three times, with the price ranging from $120,000 to $150,000. The seeming incongruity between the ephemeral object and the high price it commanded prompted age-old conversations about what is art. The work, however, appeared to critique how art is made in the 21st century. Comedian recalls Marcel Duchamp’s revolutionary Fountain, wherein a mass-produced object (in that case a urinal) became art through conceptual means: the artist’s declaration that the urinal was art, the work’s acceptance into the 1917 Independents Exhibition in New York City, and its placement on a pedestal in a gallery. Comedian, on the other hand, became art in a 21st-century way: through hype on social media and by selling at a fashionable art fair. The critique appeared to be complete in 2020 when the Guggenheim in New York City confirmed the work’s artistic merit by accepting Comedian into its collection. In 2021 the work was the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by American artist Joe Morford, who claimed to have created a similar artwork, Banana & Orange, nearly two decades earlier.