How much would you pay for a banana? At the grocery store, they’re likely to cost around $0.63 per pound. At a cafe, a single banana might cost closer to $1, while at the airport, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to see prices as high as $2. For specialty varieties, the price might be significantly higher, but still nothing that would break the bank.
Yet not all bananas are simply a nutritious snack. Some are pieces of art that are apparently worth millions of dollars and worthy of a place in a Sotheby’s auction. That was the case earlier this month, when Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s buzzworthy artwork “Comedian” was auctioned for a mind-boggling $6.24 million in New York City. “Comedian” isn’t simply a banana —it’s a banana affixed to a wall with a diagonal piece of silver duct tape, precisely 63 inches (160 cm) above the ground.
While many people have questioned whether “Comedian” is really a work of art, a piece of performance art, an art prank, or perhaps a cultural commentary on the commodification of art in a capitalist society (or something like that), there certainly seems to be a market for it. In 2019, three editions of the artwork were sold at an art fair in Miami for between $120,000 and $150,000 each, one of which was later donated anonymously to New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. One of those editions was recently auctioned at Sotheby’s, though the banana that appeared during the auction had been purchased from an Upper East Side fruit vendor earlier that day for just 35 cents.
The lucky buyer was cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun. While the auction house had estimated a selling price of around $1.5 million, it quickly surpassed expectations with its popularity among bidders, eventually going for $5.2 million (not including the buyer’s premium paid to Sotheby’s). Of course, a banana stuck to a wall doesn’t last forever, so all that Sun’s purchase actually got him, besides a piece of fruit that will rot within a few days, was a certificate of authenticity, a roll of duct tape, and detailed installation instructions—and the right to reproduce the artwork in perpetuity and boast that he is one of the three owners of the concept behind “Comedian.” To display his purchase, he will need to provide subsequent bananas himself. Basically, anyone can tape a banana to a wall, but without the certificate, it is not “Comedian.”
When a banana is more than a banana:
- The banana in “Comedian” has already been eaten twice— once in 2019 by performance artist David Datuna and last year by a South Korean student in a copycat stunt.
- Discussing the sale of “Comedian,” David Galperin, the U.S. head of contemporary art for Sotheby's, said (apparently unironically) that “it transcends geographies, language, understanding, cultural differences. And the result today, I think, spoke to its universality, the way it kind of pierces through the cultural zeitgeist to the very center.” Hmmmm.
- For his part, Cattelan has described “Comedian” as “sincere commentary on what we value.” Sun described it as “a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes and the cryptocurrency community.” Shortly after winning the auction, he said he planned to eat the banana.
