Comedian's Laugh Gag: Italian Artist Maurizio Cattelan's $6.2 Million Banana Gets Eaten Again

Mumbai: The art world’s favourite fruit snack is back in the headlines — and yes, it’s been eaten. Again. A cheeky visitor to the Pompidou-Metz museum in France took a literal bite out of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual pièce de résistance: a banana duct-taped to a wall, famously titled Comedian.

The banana, which last sold for a very ripe $6.2 million to crypto mogul Justin Sun, met its untimely demise last Saturday when the unnamed guest decided art was best served fresh. Fortunately, the museum’s security staff swiftly intervened — no fruit fight ensued — and the banana was “reinstalled within minutes,” as per Cattelan’s own rotatable banana protocol.

The artist, clearly disappointed by the diner’s lack of artistic digestion, sighed: “He should’ve eaten the peel and the tape too. That’s the full experience.” This is not the banana’s first brush with edible infamy. In 2019, performance artist David Datuna also couldn’t resist temptation and chomped down the fruit at Art Basel Miami, declaring himself simply “hungry.”

A year later, Justin Sun bought it, posed with it, and then swallowed it — performance art or investment snack, you decide. Cattelan’s Comedian was initially meant as a satire on the absurdity of the art market, but the joke keeps landing squarely — and literally — in the gut. As the ‘New York Post’ once put it, the market is clearly “bananas.” And if that wasn’t enough, Cattelan gave us “America” — a fully functional solid gold toilet once offered to Donald Trump. It was stolen in Britain in 2020, disassembled, and never flushed out again.