GOING BANANAS

Rogue Gallery Visitor Eats $6M Banana Artwork

The exclusive banana is becoming the “most-eaten” artwork of its time.

The viral duct-taped banana art installation named ‘Comedian,’ brainchild of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, has been eaten for a fourth time. The artwork, which first made headlines at Art Basel in 2019, was on display at the Centre-Pompidou Metz in eastern France. The gallery revealed on Monday that a visitor took it from the wall and ate it on July 12. “The security team acted quickly and calmly,” the gallery said in a statement, adding that police were not involved. “The artwork was reinstalled a few minutes later.” The gallery spokesperson added that the actual banana component of the work is “only a perishable element” that is replaced regularly, according to the artist’s instructions. Perhaps that’s why it gets eaten so much. This first munching came after Cattelan’s work was unveiled in 2019 at the Art Basel Miami art fair in Florida. Artist David Datuna gobbled the fruit in front of stunned visitors. The piece later sold for $120,000, with a replacement banana. In 2023, a student took the fruit from a wall in Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, and ate it. And in 2024, cryptocurrency mogul Justin Sun, who had just bought the piece for over $6 million, also decided to consume it.