Beyond that banana, Art Week Miami had a lot to say about sustainable design and climate change

A banana taped to an art gallery wall grabbed most of the attention in Florida, but Design Miami offered more wholesome food for thought

From a carbon-neutral booth to a sofa stuffed with leftover clothes, designers offered perspectives on the theme of water, its scarcity and overabundance

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“Comedian” by Italian artist Mauricio Cattelan at Art Basel Miami Beach in the US state of Florida. The exhibit highlighted the absurdity of the contemporary art market; Design Week Miami, staged at the same time, took a more optimistic to the power of human creativity.

Published: 3:00pm, 17 Dec 2019Updated: 3:00pm, 17 Dec 2019

A banana stole the show.

From VIP preview day onwards at Art Basel Miami Beach, crowds of collectors gathered to take selfies with the soft fruit taped to the wall at Perrotin Gallery. Entitled Comedian, the work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan quickly sold to three collectors for prices ranging from US$120,000 to US$150,000. Buyers received a certificate of authenticity from the artist along with “installation instructions”.

Banana memes ensued. The fruit gained its own Instagram account. Various iterations of duct-taped objects circulated online. And the excitement reached new levels when, three days into the fair, a performance artist plucked the fruit from the wall and ate it, calling the artwork “delicious”.

If the banana highlights the absurdity of the contemporary art market, in which the value attributed to art is often arbitrary and divorced from craft or cost of materials (and collectors, as the piece suggests, are primates of a lower genus), Design Miami, the platform for collectible design, offered a more hopeful perspective on humans’ creative potential.

“Coral Coffee Table” by William Coggin. Photo: Courtesy of Galerie Scene Ouverte

“We have been looking at issues of resources in the context of a changing planet,” says Aric Chen, who this year served as Design Miami’s first curatorial director. At the fair’s edition in Basel, Switzerland, Chen – who is also curator-at-large for M+ in Hong Kong – set as a theme “Elements Earth”, as a way to investigate the changing relationship between natural and artificial materials, waste and consumption. For the Miami edition, which ended on December 8, the theme was “Elements Water”.