The Super Bowl is this Sunday. It’s the one day of the year that even people who care nothing about the NFL will gather together in living rooms and at pubs to watch big men in helmets and tight pants play keep away. This is in large part because the snacks, the half-time performance, and, for many, the multi-million dollar commercials.
For any Super Bowl party, the snacks are paramount: chips and dip, nachos, buffalo wings. What about bananas? The potassium packed superfood doesn’t usually make the cut on most Super Bowl shopping lists, nor is state of the contemporary art market a top of mind when your team is 20 yards away from making a touchdown. Still, thanks to a collaboration between Meta and Ray-Ban, both the art world and your favorite yellow fruit will, for exactly 30 seconds, take the main stage on Sunday.
The commercial is for Meta’s AI-supported Ray-Ban sunglasses. In a black turtleneck and thick black spectacles, actor Chris Pratt ponders the walls of a gallery, where a banana has been duct taped and lit dramatically by an elegant square of light.
“Hey Meta, what is this artwork?” Pratt asks.
“Comedian by Maurizio Catalan worth $6.2 million dollars,” Meta’s sultry-voiced AI says. (You can almost hear the virtual eye roll when she say the word “million.”)
“What?” Pratt says to himself.
The camera pans back to reveal the words “chi de voi e quello vero” (Italian for “which of you is the real one”) in thick bold black letters above the banana, and suddenly another Chris—Chris Hemsworth, also in Ray-Bans—enters the frame while casually chomping on a banana.
Pratt’s eyes widen and Hemsworth gives a goofy, chompy grin. “What?”
“That’s a $6.2 million banana!” says Pratt.
“Are you kidding?” Hemsworth calmly retorts.
While trying to find a replacement fruit the two are interrupted by a third Chris/Kris—Kris Jenner this time—who looks at the two and asks “Who eats art?” before asking her Meta specs to call her lawyer.
If one were to actually ask that question, the answer would be just as amusing as the commercial.
The real owner of Cattelan’s market prank–cum–artwork is Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto-billionaire who bought the work last November at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. Sun, as he is wont to do, revealed himself to be the buyer and announced that he would eat the work. (He also announced that he bought the work with his very own cryptocurrency, TRON.)
A few days later, in front of a scrum of reporters and journalists, he polished off the fruit, telling the media that it was “much better than other bananas. … It’s really quite good.”
It’s unlikely that the commercial will inspire a new generation of museum curators, sculptors, art dealers, and painters, but for the art crowd, it’s definitely worth a laugh.
