The $6.24 million banana: inside Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian sale at Sotheby’s

A banana taped to a wall with a strip of duct tape sold at Sotheby’s on November 20, 2024, for $6.24 million, or roughly Rs 59.42 crore. The work, titled Comedian, is a conceptual piece by artist Maurizio Cattelan, first created in 2019.

Before the auction began, a member of Sotheby’s staff went out to buy a banana from a local fruit vendor, since the fruit itself was never meant to be permanent. The banana rotted within days, as fruit does, and has been eaten multiple times: twice by strangers before the auction even took place, and a third time by its new owner, live on camera, minutes after paying millions of dollars for it.

What actually changed hands in the sale was a certificate of authenticity and a laminated instruction sheet explaining how to tape up a replacement banana. The physical fruit itself is incidental to the work and is expected to be swapped out whenever needed.

Cattelan’s banana is one of several conceptual works that have sold for large sums despite minimal physical material. Artist Yves Klein, decades earlier, sold eight “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” between 1959 and his death in 1962 — parcels of empty, non-existent space — in exchange for pure gold. Buyers received a receipt, and if they wanted the zone to be permanently theirs, they had to burn the receipt on the banks of the Seine, while Klein threw half their gold into the river in front of them.

In 2022, one of the surviving unburned receipts, for a zone originally bought in 1959 for 20 grams of gold, sold at Sotheby’s for €1,063,500. Sotheby’s own marketing at the time compared the lot to an NFT.