A banana taped to a wall sold at Sotheby’s “The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction” on Nov. 20 for $6.2 million after fees. The buyer was Justin Sun, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who ate the banana on Nov. 29.
“Comedian” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan features a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall five feet above the floor. The conceptual artwork was created in three editions and also comes with a certificate of authenticity and diagrams for proper display.
“On what basis does an object acquire value in the art system?” Cattelan said.
“Comedian” has been the center of interventions, controversy, and multiple interpretations since 2019. When two editions sold at Art Basel in Miami Beach in December 2019 for $120,000, the simplicity of a 30-cent banana taped to a wall with a six to seven-figure selling price gained significant media attention.
Notably, a large part of this piece’s media attention circulated around each buyer’s immediate consumption of the banana after purchase.
When “Comedian” was sold and still on exhibit at the international gallery Perrotin at Art Basel, the banana was eaten by performance artist David Datuna in a piece he called “Hungry Artist.”
“What we perceive as materialism is nothing but social conditioning,” Datuna said. “Any meaningful interaction with an object could turn it to art. I am a hungry artist, and I am hungry for new interactions.”
“[Datuna] did not destroy the artwork. The banana is the idea,” Lucien Terras, a director of the gallery, explained.
In April 2023, the piece located in the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, was eaten by a student named Noh Hyun-soo, who taped the banana peel back onto the wall. Hyun-soo, an art major at Seoul National University, explained that he ate the banana because he skipped breakfast and was hungry. Later in a phone interview with a local broadcaster, Hyun-soo said that he thought “damaging a work of modern art could also be (interpreted as a kind of) artwork.”
“Comedian” was listed on Sotheby’s “The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction” in November for $1 to $1.5 million. After bidding against six rivals, Sun bought the piece for $5.2 million, which comes out to $6.24 million after fees.
“I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture,” Sun said.
A week later, Sun peeled off the tape and ate the banana at a press conference in Hong Kong.
“NFTs are a lot like this banana,” Sun said. “[Comedian] represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.”
Sun has also said he will buy 100,000 bananas, worth $25,000, from the vendor who sold the Sotheby’s auction banana for 25 cents.
The seller, Shah Alam, makes $12 an hour and said the profits would go to the stand’s owner, Mohammad Islam. Islam stated that he would split profits between himself, his brother, and six other employees.
Islam’s brother, Mohammad Alam Badsha, said the money would have little tangible impact on the lives of the fruit stand sellers.
“It’s definitely an inequality,” Badsha said in Bengali, adding the Bengali idiom “it was the difference between heaven and hell.”
