ADVERTISEMENT It’s happened again. Someone walked into a museum, spotted Maurizio Cattelan’s banana-taped-to-a-wall artwork, and decided to tuck in.
This time, the setting was the Centre Pompidou-Metz in eastern France, where the infamous ‘Comedian’ (2019) has been on display since May as part of a major retrospective marking the museum’s 15th anniversary. A visitor reportedly peeled the banana off the wall and ate it, before security “rapidly and calmly intervened,” according to a statement from the museum on Friday.
The gallery didn’t seem especially bothered. “The artwork was reinstalled a few minutes later,” it said, adding that the banana is a perishable item and is “regularly replaced according to instructions from the artist.”
Cattelan, never one to miss an opportunity for deadpan commentary, told French news agency AFP he was disappointed the visitor hadn’t fully committed. “Instead of eating the banana with its skin and duct tape, the visitor just consumed the fruit,” he said, adding that they had “confused the fruit for the work of art.”
This is at least the fourth time ‘Comedian’ has been consumed since its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, where it made headlines and prompted eye-rolls in equal measure. The original version was sold for $120,000 (€103,000) by Galerie Perrotin – and not long after, performance artist David Datuna plucked it from the wall and ate it, saying he was simply “hungry.”
Since then, ‘Comedian’ has become one of the most talked-about – and eaten – pieces of conceptual art in recent memory. In 2023, an art student at Seoul National University helped themselves to the banana during a Cattelan show at the Leeum Museum of Art, also citing hunger. And in 2024, Chinese tech entrepreneur Justin Sun bought an edition of the work at Sotheby’s for $6.24 million (€5.3 million), then ate the banana at a press conference nine days later.
Despite the snackable nature of the work, each sale includes a certificate of authenticity and detailed instructions for replacement – meaning what’s on the wall is technically never the original banana, but part of the artwork’s ongoing life cycle.
“For now, it is perhaps the most-eaten artwork of the last 30 years,” the Centre Pompidou-Metz quipped in its statement.
So far, no police reports have been filed and no bans have been announced. For now, the fruit’s back on the wall – and it may only be a matter of time before someone else gets peckish.
