A Broken Cellphone for Art Basel 2024
At 5:00 PM on Sunday, Dec 8th —precisely one hour before the closing of Art Basel Miami Beach 2024—an subversive intervention took place that both echoed and challenged one of the fair’s most notorious moments. Artist David Normal, in a calculated act of institutional critique, affixed a broken cellphone to the wall using silver duct tape, creating an unauthorized installation titled “Parting Shot.”
The piece deliberately referenced Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous “Comedian” (2019), which had sparked international debate about value and legitimacy in contemporary art when it sold for $120,000 at Art Basel. With “Comedian” recently resold for $6 million, Normal’s intervention—priced at only $2.4 million through an attached QR code—arrived at a particularly resonant moment in the ongoing discourse about art market valuations and institutional power.
This guerrilla installation joins a distinguished lineage of unauthorized artistic interventions, from Marcel Duchamp’s submission of “Fountain” to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition (1917) to more recent acts of institutional critique, such as Banksy’s “Love is in the Bin” (2018), which self-shredded at auction, “Parting Shot” uses guerrilla tactics to question art world systems of value and legitimacy. By choosing the fair’s final hour for his intervention, Normal added temporal poignancy to his critique of art world mechanisms of visibility and value.
The following documentation and artist’s statement present this significant moment in contemporary art discourse, documenting both the physical installation and its conceptual framework for historical record.
Artist’s Statement:
“Parting Shot” interrogates the contemporary relationship between artistic identity, social media presence, and institutional power. By duct-taping a broken cellphone—the essential tool of the modern artist-as-influencer—to the wall at Art Basel during its final hour of operation, the piece creates a dialogue with Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” while extending its critique into the digital machinery of art world visibility.
Where Cattelan’s banana pointed to the absurdity of art market valuations, “Parting Shot” examines the mechanisms that create such valuations in our hyperconnected age. The cellphone, typically the artist’s lifeline to social media promotion, networking, and digital brand-building, here appears in its broken state—a shattered mirror of the contemporary art world’s dependency on constant digital presence and performance.
The piece’s stated value of $2.4 million—exactly 40% of “Comedian’s” recent $6 million sale—functions as both satire and commentary on the relationship between artistic legitimacy and market valuation. Like a digital-age Trojan Horse, it infiltrates the prestigious space of Art Basel through simple materials and audacious gesture, its absurd price tag highlighting the equally absurd values assigned to established names.
In the tradition of Duchamp’s readymades, “Parting Shot” transforms a personal artifact into an art object through context and declaration. But where Duchamp’s gestures were eventually sanctified by institutional recognition, this intervention asserts its legitimacy through the very act of its unauthorized insertion into the institutional space. The attached QR code leading to Venmo serves not merely as a bid for transaction, but as a pointed commentary on the mechanisms of art world commerce.
The title “Parting Shot” operates on multiple layers: it references the phone’s role in crafting the careful social media shots that build artistic careers, while literally marking the final hour of Art Basel 2024—a last gesture of artistic insurgency as the fair closes its doors. Installed at 5 PM on the fair’s final Sunday, the piece becomes both a farewell and a defiant last word, a guerrilla intervention at the moment when the art world’s attention is already turning elsewhere. Through its broken screen, the piece reflects back the fractured nature of contemporary artistic legitimacy, where success is increasingly measured in followers, likes, and shares. The piece ultimately asks: In a system where both institutional recognition and social media influence determine artistic visibility, what happens when we claim space in the fleeting moments between legitimacy and erasure?
Bananaphone explores the connection between phones and bananas. A classic playful correlate. The broken cellphone taped to the wall subconsciously evokes the banana. This video celebrates that odd connection.
