Inside Sotheby’s $6 million sale of a banana

New York: In the Sotheby’s Auction House sale room - an intimate, carpeted seventh-floor auditorium on the Upper East Side - it’s not uncommon to see standing-room-only attendance. Or for the bidding crowd to crane their necks around one another to get a glimpse of what’s spotlighted against the richly blue wall at the front.

But on Wednesday night, the typical low-volume chatter was punctuated by something unusual. One phrase kept leaping out of murmured conversations all over the room:

"The banana … ?”

" … the banana!”

Occasionally, in a British accent: "The ba-na.”

The live portion of Wednesday’s "The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction” featured works by some of the 20th and 21st century’s best-known artists - Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons among them. But the main attraction, indisputably, was Maurizio Cattelan’s "Comedian”: a work that consists of a single banana affixed to a wall by a diagonal slash of silver duct tape.

Cattelan made headlines around the art world and the world when "Comedian” was first sold at Galerie Perrotin’s booth at Art Basel Miami in 2019. "Is this really art?” it invited people to ask, then wordlessly showed them the answer: Three editions sold for between $120,000 and $150,000 each.

As The Washington Post’s Sebastian Smee wrote at the time, the immediate outcry over whether a banana taped to a wall was capital-A art or not was understandable. Still, he wrote, "Comedian” offered up "a sharp critique of how art is commodified” and uses "humor, theatricality and a sense of the absurd to do so.”

The piece seems to have hit its target, raising questions about what it means for a work of art to so flagrantly mock the capitalism of the community from which it emerged. Like several other Cattelan works, "Comedian” has been called an "art prank.” 

File: People look at Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan's duct-taped banana entitled "Comedian," during a press preview at Sotheby's in New York, on October 25, 2024. (Photo by Timothy A Clary / AFP) 

But on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, a buyer of one of the original "Comedian” editions sold it at auction for a whopping $6.24 million - and it became hard to tell who was in on the joke.

Cattelan’s provocative works have a history of frustrating and delighting art lovers. Jerry Saltz of New York magazine wrote in 2011 that the artist’s work "is often dismissed as a bunch of sight gags, one-liners, and kitsch. He’s considered an entertainer more than an artist, a poseur joker who mocks the system that makes him able to be a millionaire poseur joker.” 

Smee wrote in 2019 that he didn’t "ultimately think Cattelan’s banana and tape is great art” and that it was "not as smart and challenging as other things he has done” - such as a statue of a small, frail Adolf Hitler, kneeling in prayer.

Outside observers have noted that the extreme impermanence of "Comedian” tests the patience of a museum-going public trained to associate antiquity with prestige. The banana, by contrast, has more than once been unceremoniously eaten by a visitor and promptly replaced, with only a slight scuffle of reprimand.

But David Galperin, the head of contemporary art for Sotheby’s U.S. operation, described "Comedian” as "universal in its instantaneity.”

"It transcends geographies, language, understanding, cultural differences,” he said after Wednesday’s auction. "And the result today, I think, spoke to its universality, the way it kind of pierces through the cultural zeitgeist to the very center.”

At Wednesday’s auction, "Comedian” sat 10th on the list of live-auction items, and when Lot No. 10 came up, so did almost every smartphone in the room. Bidding began at $800,000, and bids came "fast and furious,” as Galperin put it later. The auction house’s estimated range of $1 million to $1.5 million quickly faded into the rearview as seven bidders - a "very strong depth of bidding,” Galperin said - fought among themselves.

Around the $5 million mark, bidding briefly stalled, and the murmurs rose to a buzz. "The hammer’s coming out. This is it, final time. Don’t let it slip away,” joked auctioneer Oliver Barker, to titters and groans throughout the room.

"I’m selling it here, the world’s most expensive banana,” he added moments later, then clacked the hammer forthe winning bid: $5.2 million, before the addition of the buyer’s premium (a fee paid to the auction house on top of the sale price). A mild eruption of polite Upper East Side applause broke out; this was, after all, a room full of polished women in tall boots, long coats, pearls, headbands and lady jackets with gleaming round buttons (and a striking number of men in sneakers).

The buyer, Sotheby’s later revealed, was Justin Sun, a Chinese collector and the founder of cryptocurrency firm Tron. Sun bought the piece by phone.

Crypto bros, it turns out, love "Comedian.”

"We were not surprised, but we were excited early on by the response and engagement that we had from the cryptocurrency community,” Galperin said. "It became very apparent very fast that the entire community was energized and aligned by the philosophy and the conceptual basis of ‘Comedian’ - the questions it asks around originality, uniqueness, authorship, the conceptual nature of a work of art, the value. All of these are questions that the cryptocurrency community has been, and is, really engaged with.”

Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that "Comedian” is like a physical version of an NFT: easily reproducible, with only a certificate separating the original from the copycats. When Sun takes ownership of "Comedian,” what he’ll actually acquire "is a certificate of authenticity, along with detailed installation instructions, which grants [him] the right to reproduce that work,” Galperin explained. "The only material manifestation of it is in the certificate of authenticity.”

And there, really, is the great joke of "Comedian” and its astronomical price tag: As Galperin put it, "Comedian” can consist of " banana, duct tape.” Sun’s new $6 million