Sun eats Cattelan's 6.2 million banana and thinks he is an innovator
The collector pulled it off the wall and bit it: is it a performance? Or an individual eating a banana? To posterity the judgement
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Key points
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After buying Cattelan's banana artwork 'Comedian' for 6.2 million dollars, Chinese entrepreneur Justin Sun took it off the wall and bited it twice at a press conference in Hong Kong. The collector, active in the cryptocurrency business, had announced on X his intention to eat that fruit, or perhaps to destroy that newly acquired work of art? "Eating it at a press conference," he said convincingly, "can also become part of the history of the artwork," comparing Cattelan's conceptual work to Nft and blockchain-based art. With the gesture Sun calls for a role for collectors as art perfomers? Meanwhile Sun takes the stage by emphasising how much more power Nft and blockchain-based art can have: 'Most of Cattelan's objects and ideas exist as intellectual property and on the Internet, as opposed to something physical'. Certainly Sun was not the first to eat the banana. Back in December 2019, performance artist David Datuna at the first exhibition of "Comedian" had done so at Art Basel Miami by detaching it from gallery owner Perrotin's stand, titling the performance "Hungry Artist". But then it was 'Comedian' that was at the centre of the media battage and ended up being sold to a collector for $120,000.
From race to stall
.Sun said he felt "incredulous" when he made the winning bid on "Comedian", beating other cryptocurrency collectors Ryan Zurrer and Cozomo de'Medici. A thought then and even some change went for the banana salesman. The X Sun expressed 'gratitude' to Shah Alam, the Bangladeshi immigrant fruit seller - identified by The New York Timese - who sold the banana for $0.25 on the corner of York Ave in New York to the Sotheby's expert who taped it to the wall in the auction room.
To thank Alam, Sun promised on Musk's platform to buy 100,000 bananas from the seller's stall. It is not clear, however, whether, as Sun believes, Alam is the owner of the fruit stall, which means he would get significant earnings from this mega-order or, according to the New York Times, he is a shift worker paid $12 an hour by the stall owner and, therefore, the purchase would not end up in his pocket. But what more do you want to ask of the 34-year-old founder of the blockchain platform Tron, the USDD stablecoin, the BitTorrent protocol and the cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex with a net worth of at least $1.43 billion, to know about the physical world and work?
