This is the moment a banana was sold at Sotheby's auction house in New York. The world's most expensive banana at $5,200,000. The Catalan is yours. Congratulations. Thank you very much indeed. And with all the
With all the fees added in, it actually went for $6.2 million. But this is not just any banana. It's been stuck to a wall with a piece of silver duct tape and it's an art installation called Comedian. It's been on display around the world and it even comes with instructions on how to replace the fruit when it goes off or gets eaten.
So in this episode, you're going to hear what makes this banana a piece of art and why people are willing to pay so much for it. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and this is What In The World from the BBC World Service. What In The World
So we're going to peel back the curtain on some of the mysteries of the art world. And here to do that is BBC Arts reporter Yasmin Rufo. Hello. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. It's great to have you on the podcast. Now, for people who haven't seen this piece of artwork on their socials, can you describe it? It's a very simple piece of artwork. It is a banana taped to the wall with some duct tape. And tell me a bit about the artist behind it and what his...
Surely there was a higher concept than just that, right? Well, Maurizio Catalan, firstly, he says that it took him a year to come up with the idea. So he was very specific when it came to choosing the right fruit, where it was going to be positioned on the wall, which tape was going to be used. So it wasn't a sort of thing he came up with off the cuff. He has actually said in a previous interview that the whole point of this art is to provoke people and to make people think about...
about the meaning of art. I think more specifically, he says it's the market that has decided to take a banana stuck on the wall so seriously. If the system is so frail to slip on a banana skin, maybe it was already slippery. So part of it maybe is sort of humouring what we see as art.
He's sort of saying, actually, you know, this can be seen as art and people are willing to pay a lot of money for it. It's not actually been created right now. He created it in 2019, the piece Comedian. He created three of the same pieces of artwork. So three bananas taped to the wall with some duct tape. And it's back in the news now, I suppose, because one of those pieces of art has been on sale and it sold for six point two million dollars.
So Yasmin, I bought in a banana for my packed lunch and I've got it here in the studio with me. It's looking a little bit sad, a little bit brown, not far off the banana in the piece of artwork. And I've also picked up a roll of sellotape. So I'm going to recreate the artwork and tape my banana to the wall of the studio. Let's see if it sticks. Hopefully it will sell for as much as $6.2 million. Okay, it is now on the wall.
And we're going to see if the tape lasts the duration of the interview. But like my banana cost about 20p, right, which is less than half a dollar. Who's got five million dollars to spend on a banana and some tape? So the guy that bought it, Justin Sun, he is a cryptocurrency entrepreneur. He's Chinese. He outbid these six other people that were bidding for this artwork. He says that it's more than art. Now that he owns it, he's going to eat the banana and kind of...
prove that this is a great thing and you know I'm eating my art and I am one with the art I suppose. He says it's a cultural phenomenon that bridges the world of art, memes and the cryptocurrency community. And this banana's been eaten before right?
Yes, so Justin's son is not the first person. When it was first sold in 2019 for $120,000, it was eaten by a performance artist in Miami. So as soon as it was sold, he basically took it down and ate it as a sort of protest move. And then again in 2023, there was a South Korean art student who apparently skipped breakfast and...
and was hungry when he visited the art gallery in Korea. And so he pulled off the banana and he decided to eat it. So Justin would actually be the third person to eat this banana, not the first. What will that do to the value of this piece of artwork?
Well, as you can imagine, the banana goes rotten pretty quickly. So actually, even as a piece of art, the banana is replaced every two to three days, according to the artist that created it. And he has actually created an instruction manual to go with this. So he's not just sort of saying any old banana, any old tape, whack it in any position. It is very, very precise. It's very carefully created. And I think this...
instruction manual is a pretty hefty one in terms of how to replace the banana and how to get that piece of art right. So I suppose if you eat it, I don't know, does it lose value? If you can buy another one and stick it back up, I'm not so sure. That's exactly what I've done, right, with my sample exhibit A on the studio wall, banana with sellotape. But what is it about this piece, Comedian, that makes it art compared to
my rather sad looking decoration on the wall. Well I suppose what you've done by sticking a banana on the wall with some sellotape might look very similar to the real one that has sold for millions of dollars but actually the real one has so much more to it. I
I suppose it comes with an instruction manual on how to replace it, how to set it up. You know, the banana has to be put in a very specific way on the wall. But I suppose the other thing as well is that it comes with a certificate of authenticity. So not anyone can recreate this. I think intentionally the artist has said there are only three of these in the world and only those three are real. And anything else you create, well, you can try your best. But it's just, I suppose, like replicating a painting that you see online or...
drawing a Picasso that you've seen, it's not the same as Picasso. So I suppose that certificate is what adds to it.
So there's something about being the first person to do it, having the original thought or the original idea that makes you the artist. Absolutely. He's the artist. He's saying, I've come up with this idea and it's my idea. I'm not going to let any old person get a banana, get some tape and recreate it. Part of this being art is the fact that the artist Maurizio Catalan, he is well known for creating lots of sculptures and
and outlandish abstract art. So I suppose he's already an established artist. You might remember he created the solid gold toilet that was stolen from Blenheim Palace a few years ago. So I suppose he's used to creating something quite wacky and he's already got that prominence. So I suppose people are always excited to see what's he going to do next. I wonder if it was a totally unknown artist who went along to a museum and did that. Would it have the same value like we've done today? I'm not so sure.
So what is it about art that makes it valuable? That there's the person who creates it and all of their context and who decides how much a piece of art is worth?
Yeah, I suppose that's the interesting question here. I suppose the person who's buying it decides how much they're willing to pay for it. And I think what's interesting with this banana is Sotheby's, the auction house that was selling it, actually expected the banana to sell for $1 to $1.5 million. So even they were not prepared for the amount that someone was willing to pay for it. What other examples are there of eyebrow-raising, super-duper expensive art?
So we have in 2019, there was a steel cast of an inflatable rabbit by Jeff Koons and that sold for $91 million at the time. And that broke records actually for the highest amount a piece of art has sold by a living artist ever.
But then there's also the modern artwork of My Bed by Tracey Emin. That sold, obviously, for a little bit less than $91 million, but it still sold for $2.2 million. And that artwork basically depicts an unmade bed with floor littered with alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, condoms. And it was meant to show kind of what...
what life is like for someone after they've gone through a very difficult situation or a depressive episode. And so again, I suppose it's sold because she's a very well-recognized artist. A lot of people can maybe relate. But again, maybe it shows something that's more than just art. It makes you think that there are maybe bigger possibilities to art
The guy who bought this artwork, it's the publicity of it, isn't it? It's the fact that he can show the world that he bought it. You wonder if the internet didn't exist, would he have gone along and spent that much money and never told anyone it was him or he owned it? I think part of it is the feeling of, I own this and I want the world to know that I have the amount of money that it costs and I'm going to put it up in my house. And I'm sure when he has his dinner parties and people go around, it'll be a great talking point for him. So...
I think that's probably part of it. So it's kind of like art flex culture among the super wealthy. Talking of dinner parties, I'm actually getting quite hungry, so I'm going to pull the banana down off the wall and tuck in. That is exactly what the artist would want you to do, I think. Yes, I think so too. And then he would provide you with a very long instruction manual of how to put it back when you buy your next one in the evening. This one will not be replaced, but Yasmin, thank you so much for coming into this studio. It's been lovely talking to you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
Let's hear from someone who has big opinions on this. Maddy is in her 20s. She's from the UK and she's been working in the art world for the past six years. I first wrote about the banana work by Maurizio Catalan in 2020 in a piece which I titled Why I Hate the Banana.
I was super annoyed that the only time we see art make the headlines is for elitism and for rage bait about public spending. Art is an incredibly powerful tool for connection and for community, and works like The Banana just flog this absolute dead horse of a joke about pushing the boundaries of what art is. Good art is never this distant, gross object that's sold at an art fair in LA.
it's a public sculpture or it's a film about disability rights because all I can think about when I see the price is how many schools workshops or community murals or how many artists could have had their first exhibition with that money
And the issue there is not the artist. It's actually the buyer who has 5.2 million to spare. And Hakeem Bishara is an art commentator in New York. Here's what he thinks of it all. I was sitting in the kitchen watching the auction live on my computer. I thought I'd be entertained by the whole thing. I also thought the works was going to maybe sell for a million, 1.2 million, maybe a million and a half. But no, the bids kept coming in.
2 million. I started thinking, well, that's a bit much. 3 million. Okay, they're pushing it. 4 million. I started feeling upset. 5, 6 million. And then my blood started boiling. This is immoral for the simple reason that we have people starving to death in this world, while other people are spending 6 million dollars on a banana and a roll of tape.
Mauricio Carillon, the artist behind the work, is no Marcel Duchamp. He's a known art world prankster who's benefiting from the very system that he criticizes. I just don't believe this prank was done in good faith. Carillon might not get a cut out of the 6.2 million, but it does raise the value of his work and gives him incredible publicity.
Over 90% of artists who do not make gimmicky or sensational work like this have to take side jobs to make ends meet. They are the ones who are being left behind by this unfair clown show. There's something very poetic about the fact that this fake artwork was bought by a crypto investor who made his money out of thin air.
And if you want to hear another arty episode, we've done one on how to track down stolen paintings, where we interview a Dutch art detective who's recovered hundreds of stolen pieces, including Ivan Goff. You can listen to that wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Right, that's it from me. Time to split. Thank you for listening to this episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Gelbott, and I'll see you soon. Bye. Update breaking news. Justin Sun has just eaten his $6 million banana.