Maurizio Cattelan’s Armed Art Helpers

Cattelan, a tall, sixty-three-year-old Italian with silver hair, who was wearing a black hoodie that read “GIVE SARCASM A CHANCE,” had been quoted saying that the target of his Gagosian show was the spread of gun violence in the United States. At the range, though, he said that the work was not about gun violence. “It’s about violence,” he said, “and I use weapons as brushes.” Was Cattelan going serious on us, after three decades of self-mockery and such startling works as “La Nona Ora,” a life-size sculpture of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteor? He’d done it before. Three years ago, at Art Basel Hong Kong, Cattelan showed “Night,” a black American flag riddled with bullet holes. Over the years, it’s become clear that everything he does is serious, in part, even his world-infamous ripe banana duct-taped to a wall, which was sold in 2019 for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars—a commentary on the absurdity of the contemporary-art market.