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It’s been six years since an artist with a reputation for subversive work caused a stir after duct-taping a banana to a wall at an exhibition in Miami before selling the piece for over $100,000. That debut also marked the first time someone ripped the piece of fruit off the wall to eat it, which marked the start of a string of similar incidents that was recently extended at a museum in France.
In 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan had the chance to showcase his talents at Art Basel in Miami, and he became the talk of the town when he unveiled a new piece dubbed “Comedian,” which was literally just a banana attached to a wall with a strip of duct tape.
The installation was a Dadaesque stunt that attracted the kind of reactions you’d expect from the types of critics who hail from the “I Could Have Done That If I Wanted To” school of thought. With that said, Cattelan—who commissioned three “official” editions of the piece—attracted a couple of buyers who shelled out $120,000 to add it to their collection and another who dropped $150,00 to do so.
The banana in question was an unadulterated piece of produce purchased from a fruit stand, and the sanctioned versions that were sold were accompanied by a mounting guide and instructions to regularly replace it with a new one due to the ripening and rotting that accompany the inevitable passage of time.
In 2024, a cryptocurrency investor named Justin Sun spent $6.24 million to acquire one of those editions of “Comedian” at an auction and proceeded to eat the banana—although he wasn’t the first or last person to go that route.
The duct-taped banana at the center of “Comedian” has once again been eaten during an exhibition
A number of museums have secured the right to showcase “Comedian” within their walls, and the Centre-Pompidou in Metz (a city located in eastern France near the German border) featured it as part of an exhibition celebrating the institution’s 15th anniversary.
According to CNN, the piece managed to make headlines yet again courtesy of a visitor who headed to the gallery on July 12th and removed the banana from the wall before chowing down.
The museum issued a statement addressing what transpired, saying, The security team acted quickly and calmly, according to internal procedures” and noting “The artwork was reinstalled a few minutes later.” Cattelan also got the chance to chime while chiding the offending patron, with an representative adding he was “disappointed that the visitor had considered the fruit itself to be the artwork, instead of eating the skin and the tape that held it in place as well.”
The offender has not been identified, and it does not appear the museum plans to pursue any legal action.
This isn’t the first time someone has eaten the banana
The original Art Basel exhibition was crashed by David Datuna, a fellow provocateur who took the banana off the wall and ate it while asserting he was staging a piece of his own called “The Hungry Artist.”
In 2023, a college student in South Korea named Noh Huyn-soo went the same route at the Leeum Museum in Seoul; he initially claimed he was simply hungry while touring the exhibits but later admitted he was also trying to make a bit of a statement.
Something tells me it’s only a matter of time until history repeats itself.
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