If fruits are not satisfying snacks, repurpose them as art tools for your next masterpiece. Grab a piece of fruit and plaster it to the wall with tape secured to a blank canvas. Creativity doesn’t get any more simple than this two-step method.
For those mocking this artistic outline, an Italian artist created a piece called Comedian, which is a banana stuck to a wall with duct tape. This quick process fetched him big bucks as he sold multiple versions of this artwork for more than $100,000.
Things were looking optimistic in his career growth until he faced a lawsuit accusing him of imitating the work of another artist. The artist was not a toddler with fussy eating habits. Maurizio Cattelan is accused of copyright infringement by Joe Morford, from Glendale, California, who says Comedian is just like his own duct-taped fruit, Banana & Orange, which he first created 20 years ago.
Morford wrote in a post online: “I did this in 2000. But some dude steals my junk and pimps it for 120K+ in 2019. Plagiarism…?”
Replicating this art piece is not an easy task. Cattelan’s buyers were paying for instructions on how to install and display a banana. His rebuttal was that, unlike his banana, the fruit in Banana & Orange is synthetic, so Morford “cannot own the idea of a real banana duct-taped to a wall.”
US district judge Robert N. Scola Jr. ruled that Morford can proceed with his case because “the alleged infringement of Morford’s banana is sufficient, quantitatively and qualitatively, to state a claim.”
He took into account Morford’s argument that Cattelan had access to Banana & Orange as it was on his website and social media accounts for years. There are valid grounds to proceed with the case.
These artists are bananas. The judge can play the monkey-in-the-middle game to resolve this legal dispute.
Source: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/an-artist-sued-maurizio-cattelan-banana-2144524