An a-peeling offer.
Perhaps the world’s most expensive banana has officially sold for the crisp price tag of $6.24 million. The art piece titled “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan features a banana duct taped to a white wall, and sold at a Sotheby’s auction on Nov. 20, NBC News reported.
The piece first debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019 and quickly drew crowds, which gave it an estimated $1.5 million value, per Sotheby’s.
“They eventually had to take it off the wall,” art critic Nancy Durrant said in Sotheby’s Nov. 15 video about the auction, “because it created such a stir that the crowds were too big and they were all worried about the other artworks.”
During the Art Basel exhibition, one man took the banana off the wall and ate it.
“It eventually had to be taken down,” Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Marquee Sales, shared, “for public safety reasons.”
And while the banana has been covered on sites and publications around the world, art critics note that it is artist Cattelan’s reputation in the industry and ability to make bold statements that gave the banana so much worth.
“He’s very careful about what he does and what he allows to go into the world,” Vogue’s Dodie Kazanjian said of Cattelan in the same Sotheby’s video. “Unlike most artists, he breaks outside of art world. He’s like [Andy] Warhol in that way. So he’s not just speaking to the confines of the art world. His work lives in the world.”
She added that viewers are meant to find humor in the piece, as in most of Cattelan’s work.
“His jokes are serious and his serious works are funny,” she noted. “There’s something very deep in what Mauricio does. So the veneer of it might look like a banana, but there’s something always that’s at the core of what he’s saying.”
(E! News and NBC News are both part of the NBC Universal family.)