Maurizio Cattelan’s NIGHT: A Brilliant Reordering of Power, Memory and the Museum
Staff | ArtCollectorNews | 11th September 2026
Cattelan’s reputation as a “comic existentialist” was secured when he taped a banana to a gallery wall and it sold for $6m.Hiis work is full of punchline but also “instability of meaning”. A solid gold toilet, for example, is both absurd and a satire of excessive wealth. The Pope being felled by a meteorite illustrates the “precariousness of power.” Cattelan’s works are “not simply provocations … seriousness and irreverence are never opposites.”