“Mirror Neurons (Welcome to the Urban Jungle, #I).”

12”x 18” encaustic/ mixed media, 2021 December.

I borrowed Maurizio Cattelan’s idea and attempted to turn it into a neuroscience prank. ;)

The artist’s famous banana pinned to the wall with gray duct tape that was sold three times at Art Basel Miami, for $120,000 to $150,000 each time. The extremely popular installation was getting Mona Lisa-like attention and was removed after an incident in which a New York City-based performance artist, David Datuna, pulled the banana off the wall and ate it.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/banana-removed-art-basel.html)

Here are my thoughts on mainstream art-consumption… (quote by T Ehrenheld, 2011):

“In 1992, a team at the University of Parma, Italy discovered what have been termed “mirror neurons” in macaque monkeys: cells that fire both when the monkey took an action (like holding a banana) and saw it performed (when a man held a banana). Like monkeys, humans have mirror neurons that fire when we both perceive and take an action. Locating the tiny cells means attaching electrodes deep inside the brain.

That’s an important issue, to say the least. We often confuse our own actions with those of other people. In a study published in Psychological Science, Gerald Echterhoff, University of Muenster, Germany, and his co-authors reported that people who had watched a video of someone else doing a simple action — shaking a bottle or shuffling a deck of cards — often mistakenly recalled two weeks later that they had done so themselves. The mistake occurred even when participants were warned that they could mix up other people’s actions with their own. Echterhoff and a co-author, Isabel Lindner, of the University of Cologne, Germany, later conducted imaging studies to test how the phenomenon is related to mirroring.”