The joke

2026, Oil on Italian Linen, 101.6 x 101.6cm

The gesture of taping a real banana to a wall, which acquired extraordinary value through its gallery context alone, here is directed towards an image whose place in the canon is already secure. This work brings these different moments in art history into collision, and tests how value moves between them. The question thus becomes: if this intervention creates value on a blank wall, what happens when it enters the territory of an existing masterpiece?

The work leaves open whether such an act enriches, defaces or simply reassigns value. Within the broader series, it considers cultural authority as something that can be borrowed, interrupted and transferred. Artistic worth emerges as unstable, shaped by authorship, context - and mostly, the collective belief that sustains it.