Someone Stole a Banana Duct-Taped to the Wall of a French Museum. One of Its Twins Fetched More Than $6 Million at Auction
This isn’t the first time the fruit at the center of the infamous “Comedian” art piece has been stolen or eaten
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Not for the first time, one of the world’s most expensive bananas—the centerpiece of an infamous contemporary artwork—was stolen from a French museum over the weekend.
Duct-taped to a wall inside the Centre Pompidou-Metz in eastern France, the banana is the fruit de résistance of Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual piece Comedian, which is perhaps best-known for fetching $6.2 million at a 2024 auction. An edition of the artwork hangs as part of the museum’s “Endless Sunday” exhibition co-curated by Cattelan and “conceived as a shifting mise-en-scene” that “resists permanence, unfolding through a series of appearances, disappearances and inversions,” according to a museum statement about the show.
The unknown thief seemingly took this message to heart. On Saturday, a security guard noticed that the Comedian banana had vanished, and the museum subsequently replaced the fruit and filed a complaint with authorities against the perpetrator.
Fortunately for the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the theft does not constitute any great financial loss. Roughly every three days, as it gradually browns, the banana is normally replaced by a fresher one. Instead, the artwork’s value is derived from its certificate of authenticity and the protocol that governs its presentation rather than in its perishable element, according to the museum.
“The institution nevertheless condemns this act, which undermines the respect due for the works on display and temporarily deprives visitors of part of the experience offered by the exhibition,” museum leaders said in a statement.
The transient nature of the banana means that Comedian has survived both past thefts and bouts of hunger. When a version of it was first displayed at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, the late artist David Datuna ate the banana in what he called an art performance.
“What we perceive as materialism is nothing but social conditioning,” Datuna said in 2020, reported the Observer’s Helen Holmes. “Any meaningful interaction with an object could turn it to art. I am a hungry artist, and I am hungry for new interactions.”
Several years later, when a version of Comedian was on display at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, a college student took the banana from the wall and ate it “because he was hungry,” CNN’s Yoonjung Seo and Kathleen Magramo reported in 2023.
“I think they exhibited it so that someone would eventually eat it,” wrote Noh Hyun-soo, the culprit, in an essay in the Guardian later that year. “I wasn’t feeling much at the time, but I remember the taste. One of my tutors later asked if the banana was delicious, and I told him it was fresh, fresher than I thought it would be. I ate it as I would normally eat a banana. Nobody tried to stop me.”
And in 2024, after purchasing a version of the artwork for $6.2 million, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun ate the banana on video.
“Many friends have asked me about the taste of the banana,” Sun wrote on the video’s accompanying social media post. “To be honest, for a banana with such a back story, the taste is naturally different from an ordinary one. I could discern a hint of what Big Mike bananas from 100 years ago might have tasted like.”
Fun fact: Lost fruit
You’re not going bananas: The yellow fruit really did taste different in years past. Big Mike or Gros Michel bananas were the most common variety imported to the U.S. until the 1950s, reported Brandon Summers-Miller for Epicurious in 2023. Then the Cavendish variety took its place.
This is the second time the banana has been disrupted by a visitor while on display at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Last July, it was eaten on the premises and similarly replaced soon after.
Cattelan has responded in stride to the various unsanctioned Comedian interactions, joking that he wished people would also eat the duct tape and banana skin. But, despite the artwork’s name, Cattelan has maintained that the message of the piece is a serious one.
“To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value,” Cattelan told the Art Newspaper’s Gareth Harris in 2021. “At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules.”
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