How a viral, duct-taped banana came to be worth US$1 million – and was sold for US$6.2 million at auction

“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan,” said Sotheby's head of contemporary art, David Galperin.

Walk into any supermarket and you can generally buy a banana for less than $1. But a banana duct-taped to a wall? It just sold for US$6.2 million (S$8.32 million) at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday (Nov 20).

The artwork in question went to cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, Sotheby's said, furthering the universal conversation about what constitutes art.

The yellow banana fixed to the white wall with silver duct tape is a work entitled “Comedian”, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It first debuted in 2019 as an edition of three fruits at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, where it became a much-discussed sensation.

Was it a prank? A commentary on the state of the art world? Another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it. A backup banana was brought in. Selfie-seeking crowds became so thick, “Comedian” was withdrawn from view, but three editions of it sold for between US$120,000 and US$150,000, according to Perrotin gallery.

At Sotheby's on Wednesday, it went from a starting price of US$800,000 to US$5.2 million when the hammer fell about five minutes later, plus a buyer's premium, or fee.

Bidding soared past the pre-sale high estimate of US$1.5 million, Sotheby's said, with bidders in the room, on the phone and online.

Sun, the Chinese collector and founder of the cryptocurrency Tron, placed the winning bid over the phone. He paid in crypto and it will be the buyer's responsibility to replace the banana as it rots, according to Artnet.com.

"This is not just an artwork," Sun said in a statement to Sotheby's. "It represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community. I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history."

Sun said he would eat the banana, as at least two spectators have done in other galleries on the piece's trip around the world.

Sotheby's head of contemporary art, David Galperin, calls it profound and provocative.

“What Cattelan is really doing is turning a mirror to the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking thought about how we ascribe value to artworks, what we define as an artwork," Galperin said.

To be clear, it's not the same fruit that was on display in Miami. Those bananas are long gone. Sotheby’s says the fruit always was meant to be replaced regularly, along with the tape.

“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin said.

The very title of the piece suggests Cattelan himself likely didn't intend for it to be taken seriously. But Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, said it is worth thinking about the context.

Cattelan premiered the work at an art fair, visited by well-off art collectors, where “Comedian” was sure to get a lot of attention on social media. That might mean the art constituted a dare, of sorts, to the collectors to invest in something absurd, she said.

If “Comedian” is just a tool for understanding the insular, capitalist, art-collecting world, Cooper Jones said, “it’s not that interesting of an idea.”

But she thinks it might go beyond poking fun at rich people.

Cattelan is often thought of a “trickster artist, she said. “But his work is often at the intersection of the sort of humour and the deeply macabre. He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”

And there is a dark side to the banana, a fruit with a history entangled with imperialism, labour exploitation and corporate power.

“It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana,” Cooper Jones said. If “Comedian” is about making people think about their moral complicity in the production of objects they take for granted, then it's “at least a more useful tool or it’s at least an additional sort of place to go in terms of the questions that this work could be asking”, she said.

“Comedian” hit the block around the same time that Sotheby's also auctioned one of the famed paintings in the “Water Lilies” series by the French impressionist Claude Monet, with an expected value of around US$60 million.

When asked to compare Cattelan's banana to a classic like Monet's “Nymphéas", Galperin says impressionism was not considered art when the movement began.

“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled,” Galperin said.