Maurizio Cattelan might be the greatest con artist alive — or the most honest one. Maura Axelrod's documentary dares you to decide.

A banana taped to a wall. Clever? Stupid? Revolting? Ingenious? A symbol of the times? A play? A joke? A hoax? A trap? Watch this documentary to better understand the story of the artist — and then decide if any of those questions have answers, or if the questions were the point all along.

Maura Axelrod's Be Right Back is itself a Cattelan-esque gesture. Unable — or unwilling — to secure the artist's direct participation, the film features Italian curator Massimiliano Gioni impersonating him throughout. The documentary about one of the art world's great impostors is itself an imposture. Whether this was planned or improvised hardly matters. It feels exactly right.

Cattelan's Comedian — a banana duct-taped to a wall, first exhibited in 2019 — became one of those rare cultural objects that escapes the art world entirely and enters the wider conversation. Its sale in 2024 for over six million dollars reignited the media frenzy, though the frenzy itself was always part of the work. The organic material is less unusual in art history than it might appear — Arcimboldo built faces from fruit and vegetables in the sixteenth century, Michel Blazy has made entire installations from perishable matter — but the material is almost beside the point. The idea is what matters. Conceptually, Comedian reflects on the commodification of art; taken further, it functions as a commentary on contemporary society's relationship with value, attention, and desire. It manages to be all of these things simultaneously, which is precisely what makes it difficult to dismiss.

Conceptual art has always existed to challenge the definition of art itself, from Marcel Duchamp's readymades onward — objects stripped of their original function and placed in a context that forces the question: what makes something art, and who decides? Ernst Gombrich, in Art and Illusion (1960), argued that art began as concept long before it became image. The first cave paintings were signs — marks that meant something — before they were pictures of anything.

Which brings us, via caves, to Plato. He might have been puzzled by Comedian, assuming he didn't dismiss it outright. The banana is real, yet the whole thing is an illusion — or rather, it becomes real only through the illusion that surrounds it: the gallery, the certificate of authenticity, the price, the coverage. Cattelan himself has suggested that sculptures function primarily as images, that their true life exists in their reproductions and the conversations they generate. This is oddly Platonic — the physical object as a shadow of the idea it represents, and the idea as the only thing that truly persists. We are back in the cave. La case de départ.

And the title? Comedian. It clarifies everything and nothing. Who is the comedian — the artist, the buyer, the critic, the viewer who stands in front of a banana and tries to have a serious thought about it? Cattelan's career has been built on exactly this kind of productive uncertainty. He is magician, trickster, provocateur, and — Warhol would have recognised this immediately — brand. What buyers purchase when they acquire his work is not a banana or a canvas. It is proximity to a sensibility, membership in a particular kind of cultural knowing. "Good business is the best art," Warhol said. Cattelan has taken this seriously in ways that still make the art world uncomfortable.

Nietzsche, in his first major work, observed that tragedy flourished when Greek society was at its most vital, and that as corruption and dissatisfaction grew, comedy gained prominence — eventually displacing tragedy as the dominant cultural form. Comedian feels like a work made in that spirit: a mirror held up to a moment that has lost its capacity for gravity, that cycles through outrages and sensations with the speed of a news feed, each one replacing the last before it can be fully absorbed. The banana rots. A new banana takes its place. The price goes up.

After his retrospective ALL at the Guggenheim — in which he suspended his entire body of work from the ceiling in a gesture of total, slightly unhinged self-assessment — Cattelan announced his retirement, claiming he was no joker. Comedian was his most significant post-comeback work, and it reasserted his position with characteristic economy. This is not a work about desire. It is a work about a void — a lack that the art market rushes to fill with certificates and auction records and column inches, without ever quite touching what it is that's missing.

Marcel Duchamp said: "The artist doesn't count." Once a work is released into the world, it belongs to whoever looks at it, regardless of the artist’s intent. Cattelan seems to have understood this completely — which may be why he keeps disappearing, and why the work keeps getting more expensive every time he does.