"What’s That Banana Taped to the Wall All About?" with Ruth Grim

Wednesday, June 25, 2025 | 2:00 - 3:00pm

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan exhibited a work he titled Comedian at Art Basel Miami Beach. The work of art consisted of a banana duct-taped to the wall, which sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s creating an uproar. So what is the banana taped to the wall all about? This talk by lecture curator Ruth Grim in the OMAM Boardroom will attempt to provide some answers.

The buyer of the piece gave us an important clue when he ate the banana. When he did that, it became aligned with conceptual performance art of the mid 1960s and 1970s such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece in which spectators were invited to cut away pieces of her clothing. Conceptual performance art, in turn, can be traced back to Abstract Expressionism – particularly the work of Jackson Pollock from the 1950s. Even further back, Dada artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, and some within the Surrealist movement were challenging the notion of what art was by presenting urinals and other objects as art, proving that the banana taped to a wall is not quite as radical as it may appear.

This lecture is free, but registration is requested as seats are limited. The program will last approximately one hour.

Registration will close when talk is full.

About the Speaker

Ruth Grim has a Master of Arts from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts with a specialization in 18th and 19th century European art. Her museum career spans 32 years of curatorial work throughout the state including 18 years at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, seven years at the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, and more than six years as chief curator at the Museum of Arts & Sciences in Daytona Beach.