By Abby Schultz
Chinese entrepreneur Justin Sun — founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron — bought a banana for $6.24 million worth of crypto at a Sotheby’s auction Wednesday evening in New York.
This wasn’t just any banana, but a banana duct-taped to a wall as envisioned by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. This unusual artwork, aptly called Comedian, was sold by Perrotin gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 in two artist proofs and three editions, each of which sold for between $120,000 and $150,000.
One of those editions, owned by an anonymous collector, was put on the auction block Wednesday night after a world tour by Sotheby’s, including a stop in Hong Kong, where Sun lives.
What separates Comedian from the NFTs and traditional blue chip art that Sun has snapped up in the past few years is the banana’s ephemeral nature as conceptual art. In 2021, Sun bought a $20 million painting by Pablo Picasso at a Christie’s sale in London, and Le Nez, a sculpture by Alberto Giacommetti sold from the Macklowe Collection at Sotheby’s for $78.4 million. He was also the underbidder in the $69 million sale of Beeple’s digital Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie’s in March 2021. He’s also an active buyer and seller of NFTs.
In a call from Hong Kong, Sun told Barron’s that he studied the meaning of conceptual art after hearing about and seeing the artwork. “It took me some time to process the whole concept of conceptual art in the first place,” Sun said. What he came to realize was that “its true value lies in process rather than permanence.” In that sense, conceptual art shares a lot in common with decentralized cryptocurrencies and meme cultures on the internet, he said.
“It’s not like the meme is something you can buy — the whole process constitutes the meme itself,” Sun said.
The fact Comedian wasn’t the most valuable work sold during Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art (Ed Ruscha’s George’s Flag sold for $13.7 million) but still generated the most buzz, is part of that process, he said.
As Sun said in a statement after the sale, the banana “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.”
Bidding for the banana opened at $800,000 on Wednesday in Sotheby’s New York saleroom and within a minute escalated beyond $1.5 million, the high estimate given for the work before the sale. Seven bidders ultimately hoped to win the taped fruit, with the pool narrowing before Sun — on the phone with Jen Hua, Sotheby’s deputy chairman in Asia — emerged on top after more than six minutes. The hammer price, before fees, was $5.2 million.
“$5 million is the right amount and the budget I gave to this artist,” Sun said, indicating he might have gone a little higher but not much.
Sun said he recently watched the launch of a SpaceX rocket and now has a “crazy idea” to tape Cattelan’s banana to a space ship and send it to the moon. It’s a plan that, if enacted, will add another dimension to the artwork. Unlike the complexity involved in launching a spaceship, or building blockchain, Sun said, art is “straightforward, visual,” offering symbolism that can be more relatable.
Cattelan created Comedian as a commentary on art and value and meaning in the vein of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, a porcelain toilet, and Damien Hirst’s 1991 The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — a tiger shark swimming forever in formaldehyde within a glass display case. The owners of Comedian, including Sun, don’t own decaying fruit but a certificate with detailed instructions on how to display it and authentication that the work is by Cattelan.
Once Sun has the Comedian in his physical possession, he said he plans to exhibit it. But he also plans to eat it and “complete the decentralized cycle of this artwork.”
Write to Abby Schultz at abby.schultz@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron’s, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron’s is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
