We know that art is subjective, but can you imagine paying $6.2 million for a banana? When people are shelling out $23.7 million for Bansky's "Love in a Bin" and $1.08 million for artwork made by a robot, it's clear there's some serious money to be made in the modern art world.
When you've got billions in the bank, you might run out of things to spend your money on, and safe to say, billionaires are known for splashing the cast of some extravagant spends.
In Hong Kong, cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun paid $6.2 million to buy a banana that was taped to a wall.
Instead of cryogenically freezing this piece of modern art, he fulfilled his promise to eat it - branding the stunt as 'iconic.'
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The piece is titled "Comedian" and comes from Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Featuring a singular banana affixed to a wall with duct tape, it was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York and went for a whopping four times the initial estimated value.
According to The New York Times, the individual banana was bought for just $0.35 on the day of the auction.
The artwork comes with a certificate of authenticity and instructions on how to replace the banana when it rots.
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The auction described "Comedian" as "Passionately debated, rhapsodically venerated, and hotly contested."
Jump forward to Sun’s stunt in Honk Kong, he drew parallels between the piece of 'conceptual art' and cryptocurrency. Having recently made a $30m investment in Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial, Sun said: "It’s much better than other bananas. It’s really quite good."
While it might sound 'bananas' that someone would spend this amount on a banana and some duct tape, Sun was among the seven bidders that started at $800k.
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As for why Sun decided he was going to munch the banana, he explained "Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history."
For those struggling to see what a banana and crypto have in common, Sun compared it to the rise of NFTs: "Most of its objects and ideas exist as (intellectual property) and on the internet, as opposed to something physical."
While Cattelan is a notorious art prankster and likely laughing all the way to the bank with this one, not everyone is as lucky. The banana thT Sun ate was reportedly bought from a store run by 74-year-old Shah Alam on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Working for just $12 an hour, Alam told the NYT: "I am a poor man. I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money."
Sun referred to the response as 'poignant' and has since pledged to buy 100,000 bananas from Shah. Although it doesn't seem that he has yet, Sun claims he wants to distribute Alam's bananas worldwide as 'a celebration of the beautiful connection between everyday life and art.'
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Everyone who attended the event in Hong Kong was given a banana and a roll of duct tape, with Sun seeing it as a souvenir. Unfortunately, none of them were worth $6.2 million.