On the weekend of 12 July 2025, a visitor at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in eastern France detached a banana from a white gallery wall, peeled it, and ate it. The banana was part of Comedian (2019), a conceptual artwork by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, and it had a replacement value pegged to the last auction price of its sibling edition: $6.24 million (approximately £4.9 million), including buyer’s premium. The museum’s security staff intervened rapidly, and the fruit was replaced within minutes. The Pompidou-Metz noted that the banana “is regularly replaced according to instructions from the artist” and that the incident caused no disruption to the surrounding exhibition, Dimanche Sans Fin, a 15th-anniversary show running through February 2027.
Cattelan treated the episode as proof of his thesis. He told reporters he was disappointed the visitor had not also consumed the duct tape and banana skin – evidence, he argued, that the diner had “confused the fruit for the work of art.” The remark landed with the deadpan precision that has defined Cattelan’s career: a self-taught artist from Padua, born 21 September 1960, who has spent three decades weaponising humour against the art market’s most sacred assumptions.
What Comedian Actually Is
Comedian is not, in any material sense, a banana. It is a certificate of authenticity – a legal document granting its owner the right to display a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall at a height of exactly 1.6 metres, using a single roll of silver tape. The certificate includes detailed diagrams and instructions for placement. The banana and tape are replaceable; the physical object is explicitly not the artwork. Cattelan purchased the original fruit from a Miami grocery store for an estimated 30 cents.
The work was conceived as an edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs. Galerie Perrotin exhibited the first version at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019, and two editions sold during the VIP preview for $120,000 each. The gallery raised the asking price for the third to $150,000, intending to sell it to a museum. An anonymous donor acquired it for the Guggenheim. It was Cattelan’s first artwork for an art fair in more than 15 years. Emmanuel Perrotin described Comedian as “a symbol of global trade, a double entendre, as well as a classic device for humour.” The banana’s perishability was the point: the work is designed to decay and be replaced, making impermanence its defining feature.
The First Eating: David Datuna at Art Basel 2019
On 7 December 2019, the penultimate day of the fair, the Georgian-born New York performance artist David Datuna removed the banana from Perrotin’s wall and ate it. He filmed the act and posted it to Instagram, titling the performance Hungry Artist. “I love Maurizio Cattelan artwork and I really love this installation. It’s very delicious,” Datuna wrote. He later added: “Any meaningful interaction with an object could turn it to art.” Perrotin replaced the banana immediately. The gallery director told the Miami Herald that “he did not destroy the artwork. The banana is the idea.” No legal action was taken, though Datuna was asked to leave. The incident triggered crowd-control problems that forced Perrotin to withdraw Comedian from display, citing safety concerns for neighbouring exhibitors.
The pattern has since repeated. In April 2023, a student named Noh Hyun-soo consumed the fruit at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, telling staff he had skipped breakfast. He taped the peel back onto the wall, and the museum replaced the banana without incident.
The $6.2 Million Sale: Justin Sun at Sotheby’s
On 20 November 2024, an edition of Comedian appeared at Sotheby’s “The Now and Contemporary Evening Sale” in New York – the first time any version had been offered at auction. Sotheby’s estimated the piece at $1 million to $1.5 million. Seven bidders competed in a seven-minute war that pushed the hammer price to $5.2 million before fees. The total, including the buyer’s premium, came to $6,240,000.
The winning bidder was Justin Sun, the Chinese entrepreneur and founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON. Sun, who had previously claimed to be the underbidder on Beeple’s Everydays – The First 5,000 Days (which sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s in 2021), placed his bid by phone. He confirmed he paid in cryptocurrency and stated he would eat the banana upon receiving it, calling the act a way of “honouring its place in both art history and popular culture.” The sale price represented a 5,100% increase on the original $120,000 retail price.
Cattelan’s Broader Provocations
Comedian sits within an oeuvre built on institutional disruption. In 1999, Cattelan created La Nona Ora, a wax figure of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, which sold at Christie’s for $886,000 in 2001. He exhibited Him, a wax sculpture of Hitler kneeling in prayer, which sold for more than $17 million at Christie’s in 2016. In 2016, the Guggenheim installed America, a fully functional 18-karat gold toilet weighing 103 kilograms, which over 100,000 visitors used. The original was stolen from Blenheim Palace in September 2019 and never recovered; a second version sold at Sotheby’s in November 2025 for $12.1 million.
What the Banana Exposes
Cattelan has refused to interpret his own work. “If you think my work is provocative, it means that reality is extremely provocative, and we just don’t react to it,” he told interviewers. The comment frames Comedian as a mirror held to the systems that assign value – the galleries, auction houses and collectors whose attention economies transformed a 30-cent banana into a multi-million-dollar object.
Each eating adds a chapter to Comedian‘s biography, and each replacement reinforces the idea that the physical banana is incidental. When the Pompidou-Metz replaced the fruit in July 2025, it was not repairing damage but continuing a performance that has run since a Miami grocery store in December 2019.
