Crypto tycoon pays $6.2m for banana duct-taped to a wall

After more than six minutes of fierce bidding.

Arguably the most famous artwork of the past decade has found a new buyer. Comedian, a sculpture by the artist Maurizio Cattelan, consisting of a piece of duct tape and a banana stuck to a wall, has sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York after more than six minutes of fierce bidding. The buyer is China-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, the auction house confirmed.

In an interview with Bloomberg following the sale, Sun said he was considering paying with the cryptocurrency he founded, Tron (TRX), but failing that with Bitcoin, which hit a record $95 000 at the time of the auction. (The lot was the only one of the night for which Sotheby’s would accept payments in crypto.)

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“First of all, I’m a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, but I also buy a lot of art,” says Sun, referencing his purchases of Picasso and Warhol and Giacometti. “I found about Comedian a month ago, and I loved the idea,” he continues. “It echoes with our idea of decentralization in the crypto world, because this is a conceptual artwork—it’s impossible for you to destroy the artwork itself.”

The work, which is one of an edition of three (plus two artist’s proofs), carried a presale estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million, though advance buzz predicted (accurately, as it turns out) it would sell for several times that amount. “It’s an artwork that’s a perfect representation of the times that we’re living in, which celebrates spectacle,” said adviser Rob Teeters a few hours before the sale.

The piece premiered in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, when it was displayed in the booth of the Perrotin gallery. It immediately caused a stir, with onlookers growing so thick that the gallery was forced to take it down for crowd control. All three works from the edition sold for $120 000 to $150 000. One was subsequently donated to the Guggenheim; the other two remain in private hands.

It didn’t take long for Cattelan’s duct-taped banana to become a world-famous meme, appearing on the front page of the New York Post (“Bananas!”), posted by celebrities and turned into hats, knockoffs and other merchandise.

It’s also considered by many in the art world as a legitimate work of fine art. The New York Times’ Jason Farago wrote a lengthy defense of the piece, arguing that the work “is a sculpture, one that continues Mr Cattelan’s decades-long reliance on suspension to make the obvious seem ridiculous and to deflate and defeat the pretensions of earlier art.” Comedian, Farago went on, is a continuation of “Cattelan’s willingness to implicate himself within the economic, social and discursive systems that structure how we see and what we value.”

The buyer on Wednesday night was purchasing a certificate of authenticity that gave them the right to manifest the piece as an official artwork, though Sotheby’s says they’ll in fact also receive a banana and a roll of duct tape as a sort of starter kit. (The work also comes with a detailed instruction manual for how it should be presented.)

As the lot came up, attendees in the packed auction room almost uniformly raised their phones to take videos. Auctioneer Oliver Barker began bidding at $800,000, and at least two phone bidders, two online, as well as three in the room, quickly pushed the work past its high estimate in under 20 seconds. (The puns flew—“don’t let it slip away,” said Barker.) By the end, it came down to one online bidder competing against one phone bidder.

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Finally the hammer came down at $5.2 million; with auction house fees known as premiums, the final price was $6.24 million. Lofty as the result might be, it failed to eclipse the auction record for Cattelan’s work, set in 2016 at Christie’s New York for a sculpture of a kneeling Adolf Hitler (Him, 2001), which sold for $17.2 million.

Comedian isn’t the first sale to grab headlines during this year’s mega November auction week in New York. On Tuesday, a painting by the surrealist René Magritte sold for just over $121 million at Christie’s, setting a world record for the artist and injecting some much-needed heat into an otherwise lacklustre art market.

“It’s drawing attention to the market,” Teeters said of Comedian’s sale. “Is it adding to the health of the market? No, it’s not.”

Sun plans to display the Cattelan in his Hong Kong apartment, but unlike his paintings and sculpture, he adds, “it’s very easy to bring with me—that’s the beauty of it.” Sun says he’s willing to loan the work to “any serious players in the industry who want to borrow our artwork to display it anywhere. If Elon Musk wants it, I’ll let him put it on the spaceship to Mars,” Sun concludes. “The banana goes to Mars.”

© 2024 Bloomberg

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