Kevin The Banana

The real-life story I based my children's book on:

The sequence starts with a banana duct taped to a wall. But it's not that simple. It's worth $120,000 and the wall it's stuck to is in Art Basel in Miami Beach, one of the three locations globally in the Art Basel chain which houses some of the world's most expensive modern art. The people who go there are looking to spend lots of money, and although it seems ridiculous, the art piece sold for $120,000. The artist, Maurizio Cattelan (who previously made mainstream news with a golden toilet, which was stolen from Blenheim Palace) named the piece 'Comedian'. This simple spectacle prompted a lot of debate and conversation, some arguing that it is self-aware of it's stupidity, hence the title, while others thought it was completely absurd to sell a piece of fruit for more than $100,000.

Personally, I think the whole thing is ridiculous, but interesting nonetheless. And the intrigue doesn't stop there. In my eyes, the real hero of the story is a man called David Datuna, a self-proclaimed performance artist who strode into the 'art fair' and waited patiently in the queue to see the infamous fruit. When it was his turn to see the banana, he confidently took it off the wall, started to peel it and ate it there and then. At a press conference, David said “I call the performance, ‘Hungry Artist,’ because I was hungry and I just ate it.” 




There has been so much news coverage of this chain of events, and the topic was a bit exhausted, but I wanted to tell the story from a different perspective. I thought it would be fun to write it from the banana's point of view. The story I wrote is fiction, but is still loosely based on the actual events. I personified the banana, gave it a face and called it Kevin.

I struggled with how I wanted the banana to look at first. I wasn't sure if I should give him legs, arms, ears or a nose. I wanted him to have a personality, but I was conscious of crossing the uncanny valley and making him look too human, which would be creepy. In the end, I decided to keep it simple and do the illustrations in a cartoon style with bright colours.