The most talked-about lot of the New York auction season, the duct-taped banana by Maurizio Cattelan, sold for a hammer price of $5.2m ($6.2m with fees) at Sotheby’s New York after a seven-minute bidding war.
Comedian (2019), which consists of a banana attached to a wall with silver duct tape, was the most anticipated lot on Wednesday (20 November) at Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary auction, dedicated to the latest works being sold by the auction house this week. The winning bid far exceeded the auction house’s $1m to $1.5m estimate.
Bidders drove the price up to $5.2m before a winner emerged, with a Chinese buyer on the phone with Jen Hua, the deputy chairman of Sotheby's Asia, outdueling online bidders. Sotheby’s said after the sale that the buyer was Justin Sun, a Chinese collector and founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron. Sun has previously bid on other splashy auction lots, including buying a $78m Giacometti sculpture at Sotheby's in 2021 and, he claims, narrowly missing out on Beeple's record-breaking NFT (non-fungible token) earlier that same year.
Comedian "represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community", Sun said in a statement through Sotheby's after purchasing the lot. "I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history." Sun plans to eat the banana, he added, as a way of "honouring its place in both art history and popular culture".
Sotheby's said before the sale that the auction house would accept cryptocurrency for the work and confirmed that Sun will pay in crypto, though it did not specify which currency.
Sotheby's auctioneer Oliver Barker opens the bidding on Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian (2019) Screenshot view YouTube
The lot, which came to auction backed by a guarantee, includes a single roll of duct tape and one banana, the latter of which the auction house has sourced from the fruit stand outside its headquarters on York Avenue, where Wednesday’s auction was held. The winner of the auction becomes the owner of a certificate of authenticity and specific instructions by Cattelan for how to display the work.
When Cattelan debuted Comedian at Perrotin’s stand during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, it was his first “sculpture” in 15 years and he described the work as “a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value”. The work quickly became the most popular object at the event, and Perrotin took it down before the end of the fair due to crowd concerns. Comedian has been derided as both a consequence of art-market excess and lauded as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of its own absurdity. The banana component of the work has been eaten while on display twice, first by a performance artist at Art Basel Miami Beach and again by a hungry art student at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul in 2023 (when informed of the latter incident, Cattelan said it was “no problem at all”.)
Perrotin sold three editions of the work during the fair in 2019, priced between $120,000 and $150,000. The edition sold at Sotheby’s previously traded hands privately, according to the auction house. Another has been acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.