A Banana? -Your Are Being Punked
The "food-as-art" phenomenon centers around Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous conceptual piece, Comedian—originally a fresh banana duct-taped to a gallery wall. What started as a cheeky 2019 stunt at Art Basel Miami Beach has morphed into an endless, exhausting cycle of high-priced market theater and copycat stunts.
Several defining moments and specific copycat episodes highlight how this punchline keeps getting repeated:
The $6.2 Million Sotheby’s Auction and Justin Sun’s Publicity Stunt
The Event: At a Sotheby’s contemporary evening auction in New York, a certified edition of Comedian fetched an astonishing $6.2 million (shattering its $1 million to $1.5 million estimate).
The Buyer: The piece was purchased by crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun.
The Copycat Follow-Up: True to the sensationalist playbook, Sun didn't just display the piece; he held a heavily publicized press conference in Hong Kong where he peeled the 30-cent fruit and ate it live on stage, declaring it "much better than other bananas".
The Museum "Hungry Visitor" Interventions
Because Cattelan's work relies on a certificate of authenticity allowing the owner to replace the physical fruit whenever it rots, the piece invites copycats who treat the museum gallery like a late-night pantry:
David Datuna (Art Basel Miami, 2019): Performance artist David Datuna casually walked up to the original installation, peeled the fruit off the wall, ate it in front of a stunned crowd, and called his stunt "Hungry Artist".
Noh Hyun-soo (Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023): A university art student walked up to the wall, peeled and ate the multi-thousand-dollar fruit because he claimed "he was hungry and had skipped breakfast," then casually duct-taped the empty peel back onto the wall.
The Pompidou-Metz Incident (2025): Another museum visitor repeated the exact same gag, walking up to the display, removing the fruit, and consuming it before security could intervene.
Corporate and Grocery Store Parodies
The macro-stunt has inspired global copycats across industries looking for cheap PR:
The Produce Aisle Imitations: Following every major price-tag headline, countless regional galleries, digital startups, and local grocers tape everything from carrots and cucumbers to energy bars and staplers to walls, issuing breathless press releases declaring "breakthroughs in conceptual grocery dada."
The entire sub-genre has turned into a self-parody where the market values a 14-page instruction manual on how to tape fruit to a drywall far more than any actual technique or craftsmanship. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggSVPIsIOOg
A banana duct-taped to a wall was sold for $6.2 million at a New York auction. Mauritzio Cattelan is the artist who came up with the $6.2 million banana which is titled "Comedian." The banana art comes with a 14-page instruction manual that serves as proof of authenticity. It tells you how to "refresh" the work by buying a new banana and new duct tape. Inside Edition's Alison Hall has more.
