Maurizio Cattelan is the world’s funniest artist. His ultra-realist works of art are three-dimensional cartoons about the contradictions and follies of the art world, art history and, beyond that, of Western civilization. Born in Italy in 1960, Cattelan made his name with sculptures like “The Ninth Hour”, a waxwork of the Pope struck by a meteorite (1999) or ‘Him’ (2001), another super-realistic waxwork, this time of Hitler as a little boy kneeling in prayer. He stuck his Italian gallerist Massimo De Carlo to the walls of his gallery with wrapping tape and dressed up his French one, Emmanuel Perrotin, in a penis outfit. He made a portrait of supermodel Stephanie Seymour for her husband, art collector and newspaper magnate Peter Brant, in which he created a bust of Seymour protruding out of a wooden plaque like an nineteenth century hunting trophy with the head of a stag.