YouSaid · the spoken record

David Galperin

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13
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2025-09-05
most recent
2025-09-05
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1
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  1. “Know and throw it out the window because nothing is ever gonna go how you think it's gonna go. And that's the beauty of the art market because what we operate on is curiosity, imagination, desire. These are things that you cannot quantify.”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “One one, one, two, one, three, one four, one five kind of stalls, a few more bids, kind of stalls. I'm like, okay, two million dollars. That's okay. I was hoping for more, but you know, it's still a good result. And then it just started going. There were two people that just really went all the way. And ultimately, we had an all-in-sale price of $6.2 million. So the buyer of the artwork received the certificate, installation instructions, the ability to exhibit the work, as well as a banana and a roll of duct tape. It was auction magic. That's the kind of the moment that you hope for when you start this journey. You never know what's going to happen, but when it clicks, it just clicks. You can factor in all of the tangibles, but the beauty of what we do is that we live and thrive on the intangible. So take everything you”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “The auction was in November 2024 at Southeast in New York. There were people that were in the room that never come to our auctions, you know, young people in banana t-shirts. The crowd was kind of electric. And I remember that day I was panicked. I knew it was going to sell. I just didn't know how it was going to go. Having had the press that we had over the course of several weeks now is the time to deliver and the stakes were high and the pressure was on. As the lot opened, I looked around the room and I'd never seen so many phones raised up videotaping the proceedings. I mean, it was as if we were at a rock concert. All you see is like the crowd of glowing iPhone screens. It was wild. And then the bidding started and, you know, we had a bunch of people on the phones. It was going one.”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “About the estimate, you know, how could this artwork be a million dollars? But I was also hearing excitement, enthusiasm. We could remember what we loved about art to begin with, right? The sense of wonder, this curiosity, this confusion, this newness, along with a sense of the unpredictable and the unexpected. We had no idea how this was going to go. And so from the moment that we signed the contract, I was frankly terrified. You know, you're staking your claim on the fact that a banana duct tape to a wall can galvanize entire market. But the minute it started to catch fire, the pieces started to click. And you know what? In an auction, you try to plant everything out as carefully as you can. You take all of the factors and inputs and you try to engineer everything so carefully and so precisely. But oftentimes you get lucky.”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Ultimately, it really didn't matter what the estimate was. Now my perception of that value versus how we get there is an entirely different thing. In order for this to work, we knew that it had to be a total surprise. And in order for that to be the case, that meant nobody could know about it. There was a very task force within the company, part of the strategy was to do this global promotional tour. We had the comedian on view every day in a different Southey's location around the globe. That's not something we can usually do because works can't operate between cities. Luckily for us because of the nature of the object, we had this opportunity to stage this very ambitious and very unconventional touring campaign. When we announced it, it did come as a complete shock to the market. People were, as we intended up in our”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “before we landed on one to one and a half million dollars. We thought about somehow pegging the estimate to the original sale price of $120,000, somehow pegging the estimate to the price of a banana, pegging the estimate to the price of a masterpiece, $100 million. And we knew that it was somewhere with”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “was of course the absurdist nature of the banana duct tape to a wall. This is a work that is worth whatever somebody's willing to pay for it. And without knowing that, without having any comps, without having anything tangible to really assign value that made it that much harder to actually determine what we were willing to risk on the opportunity to sell an artwork like this. The owner wanted a guarantee Try going to your executive management and asking them to put a capital commitment on a banana duct tape to a wall. That was a fun one. Now, how do you estimate an artwork like this? It had sold once for $120,000. Works by Maurizio Catalan have sold at auction for over $10 million. You can buy a banana for a dollar. So where in that spectrum does one price this artwork? And to be honest, we toyed around with a number of different estimates.”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “That Greece is the wheels of the art market. And so in a way, the work could have a new life through its participation within the auction machine. It was immediately clear that we needed this object in our sale. My biggest question was, what is it worth? It was hard for us to align as a team on its value, the $120,000 price tag was crazy, I guess, at the time. But why was it one hundred twenty thousand dollars and not one hundred thousand dollars or one hundred fifty thousand dollars or $250,000 or a million dollars? You know, Katalan's works have sold for many, millions of dollars over. So what's different about this one? Is it that it's conceptual? Is it that it has a certificate? That's actually not so groundbreaking. What was dumbfounding about it?”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Fast forward a couple of years, the comedian kind of recedes into memory as this ridiculous moment in the history of the contemporary art market remembered by many, but not necessarily so often discussed. I get a phone call from a collector who says to me, what would you think about bringing the comedian to auction? And immediately I was hooked. This is something that would clearly make a splash if it was done correctly. I think that when Catalan chose to show comedian for the first time within an art fair context, that was a very intentional decision. The very insertion of this into the commercial system through the art fair is a pivotal part of its nature as an artwork. And so what was interesting to me is that auction is the other blatantly commercial platform.”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “You begin to realize or suspect just what Maurizio Catalan is after. I mean, of course, it is a joke. That's the whole point, but it is so much more than just that. It is profound and rigorous and it's very kind of baseline simplicity is what I think gives it its immense power and universality. There were three versions or three certificates that were available for purchase, all versions of it had very quickly sold to some very brave collectors. For the what's now become notorious price of $120,000. Now the price was a big part of the story because without the price tag, the work's provocation is moot. It's very rare that a price is actually part of the very fabric of the artwork itself.”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Within the system itself is what makes it so successful. Catalan had very publicly announced his retirement upon his career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum and almost retreated from public view for several years. It wasn't until Art Basil Miami Beach in December 2019 when he put comedian on the wall of Emmanuel Peritin's booth that Catalan was back and back with a vengeance. People were up in arms, but at the same time everyone flocked to see it. It ricocheted around the world so quickly that by the second day there were hordes of people who had come to see it and they actually had to take the work down because it was a security risk. I mean, first, of course, I thought it was entirely absurd and it was a joke. That's your first reaction. And then...”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Comedian is an artwork by Maurizio Catalan, which is a banana duct taped to a wall. That is the physical manifestation of the artwork. The actual artwork itself is a certificate of authenticity from the artist, along with a detailed set of installation instructions. Katalan is a conceptual artist, one of the most, I would say, notorious and infamous conceptual artists of the past 30 years. He's an artist who over the course of his career has in many ways challenged our perception of art itself. His work has dealt with many of the biggest questions that plague and face contemporary art and has done it in a very pranksterish way, the way that his work subverts notions and ideals of art making”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “And if anything, the work itself is about the art market, and so getting a sort of peek beneath the curtain as to the process of bringing a work like that to auction actually reveals a lot about the dynamics of the market itself and I think speaks to the mechanics of what makes the artwork powerful. And for me, it was a lesson in trusting gut and instinct and it was a reminder that pushing the envelope a little bit can be sometimes the most rewarding thing.”

    2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Multi-Million Dollar Banana, with David Galperin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT