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    Who’s Laughing Now? Banana-as-Art Sells for $6.2 Million at Sotheby’s

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    A conceptual artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, “Comedian,” is just a fruit-stand banana taped on the wall. But 7 bidders were biting. It went to a crypto entrepreneur. A banana that for years has stirred controversy in the art world sold for $6.2 million with fees at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction on Wednesday night. It became what is arguably the most expensive fruit in the world — though it will likely be tossed in a couple days.The banana is the star of a 2019 conceptual artwork, “Comedian,” by the noted prankster Maurizio Cattelan, which is intended to be duct-taped onto the wall. It comes with a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions for owners to replace the banana — if they wish — whenever it rots. Five minutes of rapid bidding ended when the Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun placed the winning bid, besting six other rivals, which experts said was a sign that even a struggling market would spend big on spectacle.Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur and art collector, shown in New York City in 2019. He is now the owner of a $6.2 million banana.Steven Ferdman/Getty Images “Returns in the market have been flat or decreasing over the last decade,” said Michael Moses, who tracks the investment potential of artworks for clients. “It’s a fascinating asset because you can get so much joy from it that people are willing to accept lower returns. Joy is not something to be messed with.”Indeed, Sun said in a statement that the Cattelan work “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.” Sun, who watched the auction from Hong Kong, added that “in the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Magritte, Master of Surrealism, Joins the $100 Million Dollar Club

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      Move over, Picasso, Van Gogh and Warhol. With an inscrutable painting, the Belgian painter breaks the nine-figure threshold at the fall auctions.The Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte has become the latest member of that exclusive club of artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million at auction.On Tuesday night at Christie’s in Manhattan, a version of Magritte’s famously enigmatic subject, “The Empire of Light,” depicting a deserted nocturnal street below a bright daytime sky, sold for $121.2 million with fees, a record for the artist, in a packed, dark gray-painted salesroom, moodily lit in a suitably Surrealist style.Certain to sell for at least $95 million, courtesy of a guaranteed bid, the painting inspired a 10-minute duel between two telephone bidders. The price was the highest yet paid for a Surrealist work of art at auction, and made Magritte the 16th artist to break the $100 million threshold, according to data compiled by the French market analyst company Artprice.Fellow nine-figure heavyweights include Leonardo da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso (whose paintings have sold for more than $100 million at no fewer than six auctions). To date, no living artist has achieved this price level at auction.Painted in 1954 and measuring almost five-feet-high, “The Empire of Light” was the last of 19 works that Christie’s offered from the collection of the socialite, designer and philanthropist Mica Ertegun. It was one of the largest of the 17 versions of this subject that Magritte painted in oil. The best-known is probably the monumental “L’empire des lumières” in the Guggenheim Museum in Venice. Ertegun’s slightly smaller canvas, which she acquired privately in 1968, is the first in the series to include water in the foreground.“It’s maybe the best,” said Paolo Vedovi, the director of a gallery in Brussels specializing in works by Magritte and other 20th-century artists. “It seems that every big collector now wants a Magritte.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Tiny Gladiator Tells of the Reach of Roman Empire Celebrity

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      A 2,000-year-old copper knife handle depicting a gladiator will go on display at Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England, next year.The tiny copper gladiator stands ready for battle, decked out in a helmet and armor, an elaborate shield held in front as if bracing for his opponent’s blows.The figure, just three inches tall, is some 2,000 years old, and was once perched on the handle of a knife. It was found almost three decades ago by a diver in the river Tyne, near Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, which was for hundreds of years the northern frontier of the Roman Empire.The knife handle remained in the diver’s private collection until it was recently offered on loan to English Heritage, a charity that manages many of the country’s historic monuments.It will go on display in the museum at Corbridge Roman Town at Hadrian’s Wall next year, the charity said on Friday in a well-timed announcement that coincided with the release in Britain of Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II” film, starring Paul Mescal.Experts say the copper figure is evidence of how the celebrity status of gladiators reached into every corner of the once sprawling Roman Empire, including the far-flung outposts of Britain.The figure stands only 3 inches tall. English Heritage noted that because it appears to be left-handed, which would have been considered unlucky at the time, it may depict a specific person.English HeritageWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Art Basel Returns, Larger, and More French, Than Ever

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      The fair will open in a freshly redone space with a new name. ‘In a way, it’s year zero,’ explained Art Basel’s chief executive.Art Basel Paris returns for its third edition with two big changes: It will be held for the first time in the newly renovated Grand Palais, and its name, formerly Paris+ by Art Basel, has been simplified and brought in line with the organization’s other art fairs.Open to the public Oct. 18-20, 195 galleries will display their wares, an increase of 27 percent from last year, since the Grand Palais can now accommodate more dealers than the former venue, the temporary Grand Palais Éphémère.A new section will debut, too: Premise, for focused presentations of older works that can include those made before 1900, the usual cutoff point for art to appear in the Art Basel fairs. Nine galleries will participate.“In a way, it’s year zero,” Noah Horowitz, the chief executive of Art Basel, said of the fair’s reset.Despite the larger number of exhibitors this year, Horowitz noted that it was still the smallest of the four Art Basel fairs (the others take place in Hong Kong, Miami Beach and Basel, Switzerland) and had the smallest booths. Space is still at a premium.“The selection process for Art Basel Paris was in many ways the most excruciating process I’ve ever borne witness to, only because of the extra amount of demand and the relative paucity of space,” Horowitz said. “There are incredible galleries, all very well deserving, that are not in the show.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brooklyn Museum at 200 Celebrates Beauty and Art’s Hidden History

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      At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it’s doing so in characteristic fashion — meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum.And it does so with two large-scale season-opening projects. One is a complete rehang and rethink of its American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from two hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The other, less radical, is a community-based roundup of new work by more than 200 contemporary artists living and working in the borough.Let me wedge in some history here. The museum was founded in 1823 as a circulating public library in what was then the Village of Brooklyn, across the river and independent from a rivalrous Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the library, called the Brooklyn Institute, began collecting, along with books, natural history specimens and art. (Among the first pieces acquired was a painting, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855), by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand. It’s in the American galleries rehang.)Asher B. Durand, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness,” 1855.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn 1898, what is now the museum moved into a version of its present McKim, Mead & White home where, over time, it scored some cultural coups. It was among the first United States museum to present African art as art rather than as ethnology. It organized a nervy survey of avant-garde European modernist art in 1926, three years before MoMA existed. The museum was also one of the first in the country to have an art school, and to create a conservation lab.As time went on it also courted controversy by giving space to art unwelcome elsewhere. In 1980, while two other museums backed out of a traveling tour of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn not only took it in but acquired the installation for its collection. (It’s on permanent view in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, another Brooklyn first.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gabriel Sachter-Smith’s Quest for Wild Bananas Around the World

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      Gabriel Sachter-Smith is a banana aficionado who has identified some 500 varieties of banana on expeditions around the tropical world. “It’s like collecting Pokémon,” Mr. Sachter-Smith said at his farm, Hawaii Banana Source, on the North Shore of Oahu. He was walking through rows of young plants, some of the 150 varieties he grows, in a T-shirt splotched with mud and banana sap. His one-eyed dog, Mendel, trotted along at his boots. “My default mode of being alive is ‘What is that banana?’” he said.Mr. Sachter-Smith, 35, caught the banana bug when he was 14, on a trip with his mother to Washington, D.C., where he saw banana plants in her friend’s yard. The friend said they weren’t trees, that she could dig them up for winter, stick them inside and replant them when it warmed. When he returned home to Colorado, he started growing them as house plants. “I was trying to figure out what is a banana plant,” he said. “It’s just been a never-ending quest since then.”Mr. Sachter-Smith left banana-inhospitable Colorado to study tropical plant and soil science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, ultimately earning a master’s degree. His global quest has introduced him to bananas that are egg-shaped and orange, a foot long and pale yellow, sausage-stubby and green. They are eaten fried, roasted, boiled and as is, but also grown for pig feed, decoration and weaving fabric. In Papua New Guinea, where Mr. Sachter-Smith has gone on two expeditions hunting for bananas, their names carry many meanings: “young men” (mero mero), “can feed a whole family” (navotavu), “something that was fought over” (bukatawawe), “breast” (nono).You probably know just one banana: long, yellow, kind of flavorless. You eat it plain, put peanut butter on it, or toss it, overripe, in the freezer to make banana bread someday. (You won’t.) Its name, Cavendish, comes from a 19th-century English duke who was sent a package of the bananas and whose gardener grew them in a greenhouse. The Cavendish now accounts for almost half of all bananas produced globally and nearly all exports. It holds a Guinness World Record as the most eaten fruit.Red bananas in a Sri Lankan market.Anne-Marie Palmer/AlamyThe hairy banana, or pink banana, growing in Assam, India.Florapix/AlamyBut for years, scientists have warned that fungal diseases like black sigatoka and Tropical Race 4 could wipe out this monocrop, just as a fungus annihilated its predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s and 1960s. Genetic engineering and breeding are the most likely solutions, so scientists have built a stash of backup bananas from around the world, with genes that might someday see action on the global market.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For the Rescuer of an Ancient Shipwreck, Trouble Arrived in the Mail

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      The packages were sent to a woman whose work had led to the heralded recovery of the Kyrenia, and to new insights into classical Greek seafaring. But their ancient contents were a problem.In the 1960s, Susan Womer Katzev, a marine illustrator, and her husband, the archaeologist Michael L. Katzev, spent two summers diving with a team beneath the lapping waves of the Mediterranean off Cyprus.Their quarry was an ancient shipwreck on the sandy ocean floor discovered just years earlier by a man foraging for sponge. It would become a startling find.Before it sank in the third century B.C., the Kyrenia had traded food, iron and millstones out of its home port, thought to be the island of Rhodes. After more than 2,000 years underwater, much of its hull and cargo — old plates, coins, amphoras that once held wine and others that still held almonds — were remarkably intact.Mrs. Katzev’s drawings and photographs helped document a discovery that revealed not only ancient trading behaviors but also a wealth of information about how the Greeks built ships. For decades, her and her husband’s efforts have been heralded for their central role in establishing nautical archaeology as a field.This year, some two decades after Mr. Katzev’s death, Mrs. Katzev and a co-editor won plaudits for a definitive account of the ship’s excavation, a 421-page first volume that won a major award in January from the Archaeological Institute of America.The shipwreck became known as Kyrenia because it was found in a part of the Mediterranean that is not far from that town on the coast of Cyprus. Paul Popper/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Heirs of Jews Who Fled the Nazis Return Art to Heirs Whose Family Could Not

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      An Egon Schiele drawing was returned on Friday at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The heirs said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do.”“Seated Nude Woman,” a drawing by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, was returned on Friday to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish art collector and Viennese cabaret performer who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.The drawing had been held by the heirs of a Jewish couple who fled the Nazis just before World War II and later unknowingly bought the work, which investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office say were among dozens looted from Grünbaum by the Third Reich.The return took place at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan. The grandchildren of the couple, Ernst and Helene Papanek, said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do” in the face of evidence it had been looted.Since September, five museums and four private owners have handed back 11 works once owned by Grünbaum in what has become the largest Holocaust art restitution case in the United States.One museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, has challenged an order from investigators to turn over a 12th Schiele, “Russian War Prisoner,” that was once owned by Grünbaum, who died in a concentration camp in 1941. The museum has contested the evidence cited by investigators and a legal battle over the work is proceeding in New York State Supreme Court.A Grünbaum descendant, Timothy Reif, responded to Friday’s return in a statement that said the recovery of the work sends a message “that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Art Forger Had Fooled Thousands. Then He Met Doug.

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      When a man obsessed with woodblocks began to do business with a man obsessed with medical antiques, their relationship flowered — until it soured.Earl Washington loves wood.He loves maple wood from Wisconsin and boxwood from Turkey. He loves running his hands on its surface, feeling its heft and texture. But most of all he loves carving it. Thoughts about carving, he says, consume his waking moments.“If I’m looking at your face when I’m talking to you, I’m literally looking at how I’m going to carve your eyes and carve your nose on a piece of wood,” he said in an interview.For decades, beginning in the late 1990s, Washington, 62, created thousands of ornate woodblocks and used them to make intricate prints of all kinds of things: biblical imagery, erotica, anatomical illustrations, the stark motifs of German expressionism.Mastery was never enough for him, though. To profitably sell woodblocks — which can be an oddity in the art market — Washington decided he also needed myth. So he created elaborate origin stories for his pieces. Some, he claimed, had been made or acquired by his great-grandfather. Others he promoted as rare creations from the 16th and 17th centuries.Thousands of people bought them unquestioningly, but a few became suspicious and raised concerns online and to the authorities. The F.B.I. fielded some complaints, but was not aware, it said later, of the “depth and the breadth” of Washington’s scheme, so he continued to sell his creations, having mastered the craft of carving and the art of fooling others.Until one day in 2013, when he met Douglas Arbittier.Everything Earl Washington feels about wood, Arbittier feels about medical antiques.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More