This work presents a plastic banana duct-taped to a white 3D-printed panel, bearing the phrase: Ceci n’est pas de l’art. The setup directly references Comedian (2019) by Maurizio Cattelan, in which a real banana taped to a wall was sold as conceptual art. While Cattelan exposed the absurdities of artistic value and commodification, this piece goes one step further by explicitly denying its own status as art.
Yet that denial is, of course, ironic — and therefore affirming. By not casually sticking the banana to a wall, but instead carefully mounting it on a pristine, 3D-printed white panel, the object is elevated and formalized. The presentation mimics museological display conventions, granting the banana the aura of an artwork even as the text below disclaims it.
The phrase Ceci n’est pas de l’art echoes René Magritte’s famous painting La trahison des images (1929), which features a pipe with the caption Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Just like Magritte confronted us with the gap between image and reality, sign and referent, this work plays with the distance between object and meaning, presentation and truth, irony and sincerity.
Is this a work of art, or a commentary on art? A joke, or a reflection? It’s precisely this tension that gives the piece its critical charge — and a quiet, conceptual poetry.