By Gaia Giordani. Cover image by Margaret Mitchem.
Ray-Ban’s latest campaign takes a bite out of art with a surreal twist, featuring Cattelan’s iconic duct-taped banana. The commercial poses the question, ‘Who eats art?’, sparking a deeper conversation about how artists have been pushing the boundaries of creativity, from edible sculptures to mind-bending performances. All art you can eat is our pushing point.
Art You Can Eat: from Meta’s latest campaign takes a surreal turn with Maurizio Cattelan’s famous duct-taped banana
We are often tricked into thinking that AI has all the answers (or at least most of them), but we know that some questions will remain unanswered:
Is AI Art a threat to creativity?
Is today’s art still human?
Can You Describe a Sunset Using Only Numbers?
Can Robotic Art Evoke Deep Emotions?
Now Meta and Ray-Ban are trying to be clever by asking a pair of glasses dadaist questions, posed in a way that would be difficult for a human to understand: Who eats art? This question resonates throughout the latest Ray-Ban Meta commercial, featuring Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt, and Kris Jenner, along with Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana.
The scene takes place in a fictional art gallery where the artwork “Comedian” is exhibited. Chris Pratt is admiring the piece when Chris Hemsworth decides to snack on it. “That’s a $6.2 million banana!”, Chris Pratt points out. While Hemsworth searches a fridge in an attempt to find a fresh banana as a replacement, Kris Jenner enters the scene and asks “Who eats art?” to her Meta AI-powered glasses.
Putting aside the absurdity of this situation, it’s worth noting that there are actually a few artists who have eaten their own artworks as a form of performance or as part of the routine to preserve their masterpieces.
The current owner of Cattelan’s Comedian, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun who purchased it in 2024 at a Sotheby’s auction in New Yor. After acquiring it, he publicly ate the banana (leaving the duct tape and peel behing). Much of the commotion surrounding this stunt was somewhat pointless, as it is known that the banana is meant to be replaced before it rots, a decision made by the artist himself.
Art Can Be Eaten (And Someone Actually Did It)
An idea, unlike food, cannot be consumed. However, there are examples in art history where performances and artworks are designed to be eaten as part of their concept. The “Eat Art” movement, founded by artist Daniel Spoerri in the 1960s, uses food as a medium, and the act of consumption is integral to the artwork itself.
Spoerri aimed to explore the meaning of taste and nutrition in human existence, creating experimental dishes that could be served in a museum or a Michelin-starred restaurant, making it difficult to tell the difference between the two: his mashed potato ice cream, and his Palindromic Dinners (where an espresso coffee served at the beginning of the meal turns out to be soup) were just as creative and artistic as Ferran Adrià molecular iconic dishes, like spherical olives and smoke foam.
Contemporary artists like Sonja Alhäuser, Joseph Beuys, and Dieter Roth, create edible artworks. In 2021, these pieces were exhibited at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, using hundreds of pounds of chocolate, caramel, popcorns, and marzipan. Visitors feasted on it, until nothing was left.
Some artists push the boundaries very far through provocative stunts, like the autosarcophagy performance by Norwegian artist Alexander Selvik Wengshoel, who ate his own hip as part of a performative artwork. Quite disturbing!
When in Florence Art Can Be Eaten as well…
If you’re attending Istituto Marangoni, be sure to visit Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri (Daniel Spoerri’s Garden) in Seggiano, located in the Grosseto countryside near Florence. You’ll discover more than 100 artworks by the Maestro and various international artists.
Don’t miss “Fuori di Taste”, the “off” events of Taste by Pitti Immagine, held at Fortezza da Basso every year in February. These events often feature intriguing masterclasses that explore the artistic side of food. Since 2021, the Gallerie degli Uffizi has been hosting “Uffizi da mangiare” (Uffizi to eat), where famous chefs create food masterpieces inspired by paintings.
