🍌 Another Bite Out of Art: Maurizio Cattelan’s Banana Strikes Again

The world’s most famous fruit-based artwork has met a familiar fate—again. Last week at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in eastern France, a visitor approached Comedian (2019), the notorious conceptual piece by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, and took a bite out of the banana taped to the wall. Museum officials confirmed the incident, noting that security swiftly intervened, though not before the banana had been consumed.

🎭 Performance or Prank?

Comedian—a banana affixed to a wall using gray duct tape—first captured the global art world’s attention at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. The piece sold for a jaw-dropping $120,000, with its subsequent editions fetching even higher prices. Though simple in form, the artwork sparked endless discourse: Is it satire? Is it genius? Or is it simply a banana?

The banana at the Pompidou-Metz exhibition was part of “The Endless Sunday,” a large-scale show marking the museum’s 15th anniversary and featuring over 400 works from the Musée National d’Art Moderne. Co-curated by Cattelan and museum director Chiara Parisi, the show explores the absurd, the ironic, and the ephemeral—a perfect thematic home for Comedian.

🍽️ “He Forgot the Tape!”

The recent fruit-snatching visitor seems to have misunderstood—or maybe brilliantly enacted—the spirit of the piece. According to Cattelan, who spoke to the AFP, he was disappointed not by the act itself, but by the method. “Instead of eating the banana with its skin and duct tape, the visitor just consumed the fruit,” the artist said with wry irony. “He confused the fruit for the artwork.”

In truth, that’s exactly the kind of confusion Cattelan has courted throughout his career. Comedian isn’t just a banana; it’s a gesture, a provocation, a looping commentary on the absurdity of artistic value. The museum, unfazed, replaced the banana within minutes—following Cattelan’s own protocol for maintaining the piece.

🤑 Big Bucks for Bananas

Though it may seem like a joke, Comedian has been one of the most lucrative artworks of the 21st century. After its initial edition sold at Art Basel, a second version changed hands for the same amount. The third was purchased by the Guggenheim for $150,000. But things escalated further in 2023 when a second edition was auctioned at Sotheby’s for a staggering $6.24 million—more than four times its estimate.

The buyer? Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire and founder of the TRON cryptocurrency platform. True to form, Sun made headlines by eating the artwork himself just days after winning the bid, during a press conference in Hong Kong. With this, he added another chapter to Comedian’s ever-expanding mythology—a performance about performance, consumption, and spectacle.

🍌 A Banana’s Long Journey Through Fame

This isn’t the first time the banana’s fate has been sealed by someone’s appetite. In 2019, during Comedian’s debut at Art Basel, performance artist David Datuna strolled up to the booth and ate the fruit, declaring that he was “hungry.” The action caused a media frenzy. The gallery simply taped another banana to the wall. And again, in 2023, a student at Seoul National University ate the fruit during an exhibit at the Leeum Museum, also citing hunger.

These incidents may seem disruptive, but they play directly into the artwork’s open-ended nature. Cattelan has said little about whether these acts are vandalism, collaboration, or merely inevitable. But each one further entangles Comedian in the story of how meaning is made—and destroyed—in contemporary art.

🧩 What Is the Art?

The brilliance—or absurdity—of Comedian lies in its ambiguity. Is the banana the art? Is the tape part of it? Or is the true artwork the idea, the conversation, the reaction it evokes? By selling certificates of authenticity rather than the physical fruit, Cattelan has ensured that Comedian lives on in perpetuity. The banana is always replaceable. The debate is not.

In a world where NFTs, AI art, and speculative markets push the boundaries of authorship and originality, Cattelan’s banana seems surprisingly timeless. It asks us to laugh, to think, to question value—and perhaps to question our own participation in the spectacle.

🥇 The Banana That Keeps Giving

Whether you see it as a joke, a mirror to our absurd art market, or a brilliant conceptual statement, Comedian remains a cultural phenomenon. And as long as people keep eating it, the performance will go on.