A customer to France’s Pompidou-Metz final week took a chew of an iteration of Comic (2019), Maurizio Cattelan‘s notorious conceptual art work that entails a banana duct-taped to a wall, the museum introduced on Friday.
Exhibitors mentioned the customer ate the fruit on show on the museum in jap France earlier than “safety workers quickly and calmly intervened.”
The work was “reinstalled inside minutes,” the museum instructed AFP, including that as “the fruit is perishable, it’s recurrently changed based on directions from the artist.”
Comic is one in every of 30 works by the Italian artist presently on show, together with greater than 400 others from the Musée Nationwide d’Artwork Moderne within the exhibition “The Infinite Sunday,” to have a good time the fifteenth anniversary of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, an outpost of the Paris flagship establishment. The present was cocurated by the artist and museum director Chiara Parisi.
Cattelan instructed the information outlet that he was disillusioned the particular person didn’t additionally eat the pores and skin of the banana in addition to the grey duct tape holding it to the wall, noting that the banana-eater had “confused the fruit for the murals.”
“As an alternative of consuming the banana with its pores and skin and duct tape, the customer simply consumed the fruit,” he instructed the AFP.
Comic has attracted consideration and controversy since its debut at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside in 2019, the place the Perrotin gallery bought the primary of the work’s three editions for $120,000. ARTnews beforehand reported that Perrotin “parted with the second version for a similar determine shortly afterward, earlier than mountaineering the worth by $30,000 for the third banana that was purchased by the Guggenheim Museum.”
A second version of the work famously bought at Sotheby’s final November, within the New and Up to date Now public sale for $6.24 million (together with charges), greater than 4 instances its $1.5 million estimate, following roughly 10 minutes of bidding from seven bidders on-line, by telephone, and within the room.
The profitable bidder was revealed to be Justin Solar, a Chinese language billionaire and founding father of cryptocurrency platform TRON, who consumed it throughout a press convention in Hong Kong 9 days after the reside public sale in New York.
Along with Solar and the current incident at Centre Pompidou-Metz, Comic has been consumed not less than two different instances.
Throughout its debut at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside in 2019, efficiency artist David Datuna ate the banana at Perrotin’s sales space after saying he felt “hungry.” It was additionally eliminated on the ultimate morning of the honest after drawing an excessive amount of consideration. And in 2023, an artwork pupil at Seoul Nationwide College additionally ate the fruit whereas Comic was on view as a part of an exhibition on Cattelan on the Leeum Museum of Artwork in Seoul. The artwork pupil claimed he had skipped breakfast and was hungry.
