The viral Dole banana taped to a wall at Art Basel in Miami Beach from 2019 sold for $6.2 million to a Chinese-born entrepreneur at an auction at Sotheby’s in Manhattan on Wednesday, the New York Times reports. Entitled “Comedian,” the piece by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan apparently “comes with a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions for owners to replace the banana — if they wish — whenever it rots.”
The bidding lasted about five minutes, with seven bidders in the fray, the Times reports. The final $6.2 million sale is up from the list price between $1 million and $1.5 million, bumped higher by fast-paced bidding; the final price was $5.2 plus auction house fees, the Times reports. Back in 2019, three versions of the original sold for $120,000 to $150,000 each.
Justin Sun won the auction: Sun is behind multiple companies, including Tron. Sun has gained fame for stunts like paying $600,000 for an NTF pet rock as well as dropping $4.6 million to have a charity lunch with Warren Buffett that he didn’t show up for. Last year, Sun faced Security and Exchange Commission fraud charges that involved Lindsay Lohan and rapper Soulja Boy. For a time, Sun, who has Grenadian citizenship, was Granada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization, the Times reported.
Sun said in a statement that the Cattelan work “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community,” the Times reports.
As far as the banana going beyond the fruit cart or grocery store aisle, “It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana,” Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, told the New York Post.
Other wildly expensive fruit-as-art includes the basket of strawberries still life from Jean Siméon Chardin that was to be bought by a New York dealer at auction for $25 million until the Louvre in Paris stepped in to buy it. As far as actual fruit that isn’t deemed art (yet) a pair of Yubari King melons sold for $30,000 and the Densuke watermelon from Japan that allegedly sells for up to $6,000.
