Liputan6.com, Jakarta Visitors to a French museum ate a multimillion-dollar banana installation on display there. This was announced by the museum on Friday (July 18).
The banana is the work of Italian artist Maurizio entitled Comedian. The work was purchased for US$6.2 million in New York last year.
The museum said, as reported by AFP, that a visitor said he was hungry when he came to the museum on Saturday (July 12). The visitor then ate a banana on display there.
“Security staff quickly and calmly intervened,” said the Pompidou-Metz museum in eastern France. “The artwork was reinstalled in a matter of minutes”, it added.
“As the fruit is perishable, the bananas are replaced periodically according to the instructions of the artist.”
Eaten by visitors
Meanwhile, Cattelan said he was disappointed that “the visitor did not eat the peel and tape.”
“Instead of eating the banana with the peel and tape, the visitor ate the fruit right away,” he said.
Cattelan's edible work has sparked controversy since its debut at the Art Basel 2019 exhibition in Miami Beach.
He explained the banana work as a commentary on the art market, which he had previously criticized for being speculative and failing to help artists.
The New York Post said the US$120,000 asking price for Comedian in 2019 is proof that the market is “crazy” and the art world has “gone crazy”.
Previously been eaten
The piece has been eaten before. Performance artist David Datuna ate the Comedian in 2019, saying he was “hungry” when he examined it at a Miami exhibition.
Chinese-born crypto founder Justin Sun spent US$6.2 million on the piece last year, then ate it on camera.
In addition to his banana creations, Cattelan is also known for producing a fully functional 18-karat gold toilet called Americ" that was offered to Donald Trump during his first term in the White House.
In March 2025, a British court found two men guilty of stealing a toilet from an 18th-century stately home in the UK, which had served as the wartime birthplace of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The toilet was broken into several pieces, and no gold was ever recovered.