It's an art piece worth $6m. Someone has eaten it — again
The piece, titled Comedian, was eaten by a gallery-goer at the Centre-Pompidou Metz in eastern France on July 12, according to a statement from the museum, published Monday.
'The security team acted quickly and calmly, according to internal procedures,' the gallery said in the statement.
'The artwork was reinstalled a few minutes later,' it said, adding that the banana is 'only a perishable element' that is replaced on a regular basis according to Cattelan's instructions.
Centre-Pompidou Metz said the artist was disappointed that the visitor had considered the fruit itself to be the artwork, instead of eating the skin and the tape that held it in place as well.
The gallery has not filed a police report.
Comedian is intended to demonstrate the 'absurdity of financial speculation and the fragility of knowledge systems that underpin the art market', it said.
This is not the first time the artwork has been eaten.
In 2019, when Cattelan unveiled Comedian at the Art Basel Miami art fair in Florida, performance artist David Datuna grabbed the banana from the wall, before peeling and eating it in front of hundreds of stunned fair attendees.
This became one of the art world's biggest viral moments, and the work sold — with a replacement banana — for $US120,000 ($AU183,000) at the fair.
Then, in 2023, an art student took the banana from a wall at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, and ate it.
And in November 2024, Justin Sun, a Chinese collector and founder of a cryptocurrency platform, acquired Comedian for $US6.24 million ($AU 9.5 million) at auction — before eating the banana.
'For now, it is perhaps the 'most-eaten' artwork of the last 30 years,' Centre-Pompidou Metz said in the statement.
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