The billionaire, Cattelan’s banana and the value of things

Justin Sun, the cryptocurrency tycoon, has kept his promise. After spending $6.2 million to buy at auction at Sotheby’s last November 20th in New York the opera Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan was performed in a hotel in Hong Kong. Indeed he ate Cattelan’s banana which is only part of the work which also includes the adhesive tape with which the fruit was attached to the wall.

He ate what is evidently the most expensive banana in history, completing with this gesture the work of art, or rather the artistic action. To those who watched it from the outside, to many on social media, it appeared very little like an artistic performanceeven if the weight of Cattelan’s banana is carried more by what is done around it, than by the intrinsic value of the fruit.

In fact, the banana replaces itself. It had been eaten during an exhibition in Seoul. It can be changed, indeed it must be because the fruit rots. The work arrives with management kit.

How do you see it from the outside? For many it is waste and madness. “This guy actually paid $6 million to go viral by eating a banana. It’s a bit ugly but fun at the same time.” «So sad! I hope the banana was worth $6.2 million! Only in your country do people suffer from hunger and to impress you could have fed them! Loser”. Others understand and play the game that this work of art is.

Interviewed by New York Times the greengrocer who sold the banana is of the opinion of the first group: “it is absurd to pay 6.2 million for the same banana”. The billionaire said that he would like to buy 100,000 from the same kiosk to distribute them for free. Too much for the wholesale market said the seller and in any case the total is 6000 dollars, not the monstrous figure of the auction. This is the distance between the real life of those who do the math every day and the millionaire system of finance passed in this case for art. An unbridgeable and unfair distance?