Opinion Express View: Student eating a banana that was part of a museum installation is hunger — not art

South Korean art student Noh Huyn-soo may or may not be starving in the garret, but he was hungry enough to eat a work of art on display at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. The artwork in question was a banana taped to a wall, part of an installation by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. His act of damaging a work of art, Noh later said, could also be interpreted as “artwork”.

Noh’s glibness about the incident perhaps comes from the fact that this is not the first time that one of Cattelan’s bananas has been consumed by a viewer. When the Comedian installation debuted at the Miami Art Basel in 2019, a banana had been eaten by the performance artist David Datuna who objected to “20 cent bananas” being sold for millions of dollars, even as millions of people around the world starve. Indeed, the history of “artistic vandalism” as critique includes such names as Jeff Koons and Ai Wei Wei. In the former’s case, red paint was splashed on the walls of a gallery displaying his art, by an artist named Istvan Kantor who was protesting the high prices commanded by Koons. More famous is the incident where a local artist named Maximo Caminero, to draw attention to how a Miami museum was ignoring local artists, smashed a 7,000 year old vase that was part of Ai’s installation which included photos of the Chinese artist himself smashing Han dynasty urns as an act of iconoclasm.

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In the case of Noh, however, given his original declaration of hunger, it may be harder to attribute higher-minded motives. And, perhaps, there is no need. The fruit, after all, would have been replaced with a fresh piece after a few days anyway — how much damage was really caused by a student simply trying to make up for skipping breakfast?