These Bananas Duct-Taped to the Wall Are Worth Millions. Hungry Museumgoers Keep Eating Them
A visitor recently ate the banana from Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” which was on view at the Center Pompidou-Metz. The artwork, which sold for $6.2 million last year, has met this fate before
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Comedian, Maurizio Cattelan, 2019
Zeno Zotti / Maurizio Cattelan’s Archive / Perrotin
A museumgoer in France has eaten Maurizio Cattelan’s famous banana duct-taped to a wall.
Titled Comedian, the artwork is currently on display in an exhibition called “Endless Sunday,” which features multiple pieces by Cattelan, at the Center Pompidou-Metz in northern France. According to a statement from the museum, the sculptor takes a “perceptive and unorthodox approach,” and “his outlook is both melancholic and ironic.”
Earlier this month, a visitor removed the banana from the wall and promptly ate it. The museum says that security “rapidly and calmly intervened,” and the work was “reinstalled within minutes,” reports Agence France-Presse.
Quick fact: What Comedian’s buyers get
When someone purchases a version of Maurizio Cattelan’s viral artwork at auction, they receive a certificate of authenticity and instructions that explain how to set up the installation.
“As the fruit is perishable, it is regularly replaced according to instructions from the artist,” adds the museum.
This incident wasn’t the first time that a museumgoer ate Comedian. Cattelan debuted the artwork at Art Basel Miami in 2019, when it was consumed by performance artist David Datuna. At the same event, three versions of the work sold for between $120,000 and $150,000 each.
In 2023, a young visitor to the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul peeled and ate Cattelan’s banana, later saying that “he was hungry,” according to CNN’s Yoonjung Seo. Last year, another version of Comedian sold at auction for $6.2 million—and its new owner, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, ate the banana shortly after the sale. “It’s much better than other bananas,” he said, per the Associated Press’ Kanis Leung.
Cattelan is famous for turning mundane objects into “vehicles of both delight and critique,” Emmanuel Perrotin, founder of Perrotin gallery (which represents Cattelan), told CNN’s Rory Sullivan in 2019. Bananas are “a symbol of global trade, a double entendre, as well as a classic device for humor,” he added.
When Cattelan debuted Comedian, he hadn’t contributed to an art fair in 15 years. It became a viral sensation—first for its absurdity, and then for its price.
“To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value,” Cattelan told the Art Newspaper’s Gareth Harris in 2021. “At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: If I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings.”
After the recent incident at the Center Pompidou-Metz, Cattelan gave a “characteristically tongue-and-cheek retort,” writes Artnet’s Richard Whiddington. The artist insists that the visitor “confused the fruit for the work of art. … Instead of eating the banana with its skin and duct tape, the visitor just consumed the fruit.”
