The Pompidou-Metz Center reported that an incident occurred on Saturday during the exhibition ‘Un dimanche sans fin’ (‘An Endless Sunday’), featuring a piece by the Italian artist.
A man removed a banana from the artwork, peeled it, and ate it, explaining that he was “impressed” by the fact that the piece was valued at $6.2 million (5.9 million euros) and sold at auction last November in New York to a cryptocurrency entrepreneur.
The museum stated that security services “quickly and calmly intervened,” and the artwork “was reinstalled in a few minutes,” noting that the banana is a perishable item regularly replaced according to a protocol defined by the artist.
‘Comedian’ comes with a Certificate of Authenticity, and owners are informed they may replace the banana if necessary.
The piece ‘Comedian’ was first presented in 2019 at the Art Basel fair in Miami, where it sold for $120,000. It gained notoriety when another artist, American David Datuna, ate the banana on display.
‘Comedian’ became a global sensation, significantly impacting “contemporary cultural consciousness,” according to Sotheby’s, which auctioned the piece in New York in November.
The artist did not receive any proceeds from this sale, as ‘Comedian’ belonged to a collector holding the Certificate of Authenticity. The banana achieved artistic status by following protocol after being purchased for 35 cents from street vendor Shah Alam near Sotheby’s in New York, as reported by The New York Times.
The piece is exhibited at the Serralves Museum in Porto since July 3, as part of the ‘Sussurro’ exhibition, which gathers 26 works by Maurizio Cattelan.
The exhibition, free to the public until January next year, brings several of Cattelan’s iconic creations to Portugal for the first time, specifically designed for Serralves’ House and Park.
Born in Padua in 1960, Cattelan lives and works in New York, gaining prominence with ‘The Ninth Hour,’ a wax statue of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite, displayed in 1999 at Kunsthalle Basel.
Among other notable works, Cattelan replaced a toilet at the Guggenheim Museum in 2016 with a gold replica, accessible to the public.
