The Most Controversial Artworks of the 21st Century So Far

Italian prankster Maurizio Cattelan is known for creating provocations that are mainly the focus of art world ire (though his sculpture of Pope John II being struck down by a meteorite earned condemnation from the Catholic League). With Comedian, Cattelan cooked up another outrage by duct-taping a banana to a wall (a relatively low-key effort compared with greatest hits like his solid-gold toilet for the Guggenheim, which made headlines on its 2016 debut and again when stolen while on loan to England’s Blenheim Palace). During Sotheby’s November 2024 sales, Comedian fetched $6.24 million, seizing the media’s—and therefore the public’s—attention. Most people (including a fruit vendor outside Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn, who offered a similar item for $1.24) got the joke, which, after all, was fairly shallow, or perhaps “about” shallowness. Who knows? Cattelan, presumably, who here presented a kind of self-portrait as summary judgment of his own work.

Found next to Cattelan’s banana in the “They-spent-how-much-for-that?” file, Everydays, by the artist known as Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), fetched northwards of $69 million at Christie’s on March 11, 2021. It was the third-highest sum ever paid for the work of a living artist, behind Jeff Koons’s Rabbit and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), and while that may be remarkable, it’s doubly so considering that Winkelmann’s piece—an NFT—existed only digitally. It also didn’t help that at the time, journalists were still struggling to explain exactly what an NFT was. An acronym for non-fungible token, an NFT uses strands of data from a centralized computer to create unique, unalterable, digitally generated assets that are expected to accrue in value. For its part, the group of investors who bought Everydays—a mosaic compendium of the edgy digital pictures (Joe Biden pissing on Donald Trump, for example) that Winkelmann had posted each day on Instagram over 14 years—think the sky’s the limit, with one saying, “This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday.”

The OG YBA, Damian Hirst is infamous for sharks, sheep, and cows immersed in vats of formaldehyde as well as other eyeball-grabbing projects (an underwater theme-park-cum-shipwreck-treasure-hoard) that were pricey to produce. But none of them went quite as far as For the Love of God. A sort of memento mori for oligarchs, the piece comprises a skull from an 18th-century skeleton cast in pure platinum, covered by 8,601 diamonds including a 52.4-carat pink stone set in the center of the forehead. It was reportedly sold to an anonymous consortium for $100 million, though Hirst later admitted the story was untrue (the work remains unsold and is jointly owned by Hirst, his gallery White Cube, and a group of investors). More credible was the claim by another artist, John LeKay, that the idea had been purloined from him, to which Hirst blithely replied, “All my ideas are stolen, anyway.”

Derided as a cultural shock jock by some critics, Los Angeles provocateur Paul McCarthy has spent the better part of his 50-year career rattling cages with sculptures, installations, and videos serving up sexual and scatological subject matter. So when he presented a giant outdoor artwork in the unmistakable shape of a butt plug at the Place Vendôme, Parisians didn’t take him at his word when he said that the piece depicted a tree. Instead, vandals slashed the 80-foot lime-green inflatable, and one man even went so far as to slap McCarthy in the face while calling him a dirty American and a degenerate. The opening of a concurrent exhibition in Paris was delayed for a day so McCarthy could quickly mount a video installation about the incident that recast him as a victim of abuse—making citronnade, as it were, from citrons.

Appropriation art always carries the risk of lawsuits, but Richard Prince has proved to be a veritable magnet for litigation, routinely attracting legal action for infringements of intellectual property. In an exhibition at Gagosian gallery titled “New Portraits,” Prince enlarged and printed other people’s Instagram posts on canvas, with his own pithy comments added. Five lawsuits resulted, including one by Donald Graham, whose photograph Rastafarian Smoking a Joint was borrowed by Prince from another user’s account. An additional kerfuffle arose when new iterations of the work were shown at Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019. Zoë Ligon, a Detroit-based sex educator and sex-shop owner, objected to Prince’s inclusion of her portrait posing in a red bra while denouncing laws against sex work. When the show’s curator offered to remove the image, she demanded that the whole show be pulled. The museum refused to do so, saying, “The works in the exhibition are not for sale, and are designed to prompt discussions about context, ownership, and originality”—the implication being that Ligon wasn’t exploited because Prince was not profiting monetarily from the exhibition.

Dana Schutz’s contribution to the 2017 Whitney Biennial offered proof that the difference between the best of intentions and cluelessness can be small, especially if you’re commenting on race while white. Schutz submitted a portrait of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American who, in 1955, was accused by a white woman of flirting with her and was subsequently beaten nearly to death before being fatally shot by a mob in Mississippi—a monstrous crime for which his accused killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. As a protest against the inhumanity of the act, Till’s mother decided to reveal her son’s mutilated body at an open-casket funeral, a moment captured in a hard-to-stomach photograph that inspired Schutz composition, which among other things depicted Till’s disfigured face as a flurry of abstract brushstrokes. Schutz’s formalistic rendering of Till immediately prompted a letter signed by 25 Black artists who demanded that the Whitney take down and destroy the painting. Meanwhile, protesters blocked it from view during a demonstration at the museum. Schutz claimed she was simply trying to convey a mother’s grief, which only confirmed her misguided sense of artistic privilege.

Anish Kapoor has been embroiled in controversies that seem silly in retrospect (claiming exclusive use of an ultra-black pigment, which sparked a social media beef with another artist), but the imbroglio over his 2015 sculptural installation at Versailles proved much more consequential. The piece, set within the palace’s gardens, resembled a cornucopia in Cor-Ten steel, but also a vaginal orifice when seen straight on. An errant remark by Kapoor led critics to claim that the work represented Marie Antoinette’s lady parts, which he denied. In the aftermath, Dirty Corner was vandalized twice: once with splashed paint, which Kapoor removed, and then with antisemitic graffiti (Kapoor’s mother is Jewish), which he left in place. In a galling act of chutzpah, a local right-wing politician filed a complaint with the authorities against Kapoor for promoting hate, eventually winning a judgment that ordered the work scrubbed of its offending content. Kapoor complied by covering the graffiti with gold leaf.

Over its 70-year existence, Documenta, the quinquennial showcase of contemporary art held in Kassel, Germany, has had its share of critical contretemps, but its 2022 edition was a major debacle dogged by accusations of antisemitism in a place understandably sensitive about such things. Problems started before the show opened with objections to the inclusion of Palestinian artists associated with the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The firestorm’s center, however, was an outdoor banner presented by Indonesian art collective Taring Padi, which featured images of a pig wearing a helmet emblazoned with “Mossad” and an ultra-Orthodox Jew with fangs, bloodshot eyes, and a black hat sporting the SS insignia. The piece was removed, and Documenta’s director, Sabine Schormann, who’d claimed she’d been unable to vet the piece beforehand, was forced to resign. In a profusely apologetic statement, Taring Padi said it had produced the piece 20 years earlier in a “different context,” but what exactly the difference was remained unclear.

Context was at the heart of the issue when, in 2017, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center mounted Sam Durant’s outdoor installation Scaffold. The work was a life-size replica of the gallows on which 38 Native American men were hanged in 1862, the largest mass execution in American history. It was originally commissioned for Documenta in 2012 to mark the 150th anniversary of the incident, where it elicited nary a peep. Unfortunately for the Walker, Minnesota was home to the Dakota tribe to which the condemned men belonged, and the execution had taken place in Mankato, Minnesota, just 80 miles from the museum. Protests and demonstrations by Native Americans ensued, with signs and placards reading “Take It Down” plastered on the fence surrounding the site. Remarkably, the Walker board had no idea that the execution had ever taken place, let alone how close its location had been. Durant and the Walker issued apologies, and Scaffold was soon dismantled and disposed of in a ceremonial burial overseen by Dakota elders. 

When the Guggenheim mounted its turn-of-the-millennium survey “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World,” it probably didn’t expect its coming-out party for a new wave of Chinese contemporary artists to be targeted by animal lovers. But that’s exactly what happened thanks to a video by the collaborative duo of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. It showed pairs of pit bulls on facing treadmills that forced the canines to run at each other, though they were stopped from colliding by restraints. A petition calling for “cruelty-free” exhibits at the museum garnered 40,000 signatures in less than 24 hours, and the video was removed from the show, along with two other works by different artists—a video of pigs mating and an installation of live insects and reptiles set loose together in a netting cage. There were dissenters, however: Both PEN America and Ai Weiwei, who was included in the show, protested the censoring of the works.