“The real value is the concept itself,” he said.
Sun beat six other bidders at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on November 20 to buy the conceptual artwork “Comedian.” Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan first introduced it at the Art Basel Fair Miami in 2019.
The banana displayed at Sotheby’s was purchased for 35 cents from a New York City fruit vendor. Sun has offered to buy 100,000 more bananas from the original vendor. He ate a replacement banana purchased in Hong Kong at the event.
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“To be honest, for a banana with such a back story, the taste is naturally different from an ordinary one. I could discern a hint of what Big Mike bananas from 100 years ago might have tasted like,” Sun later wrote on X, referring to the commercially extinct Gros Michel banana variety.
At the event hosted at the Peninsula Hotel, attendees were given bananas and duct tape to replicate the experience at home.
It is customary for the banana to be replaced. Sun’s purchase includes a guide for installing the art, a right to display it, and a certificate of authenticity. Two previous versions were eaten in 2019 and 2023 by performance artist David Datuna and a South Korean university student, respectively.
Sun compared “Comedian” to digital assets such as NFTs.
“This conceptual artwork can be assembled and disassembled anywhere and at any time conveniently and in any place in the world,” he said. “This is kind of a demonstration of decentralization.”
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Sun also made headlines earlier this week after announcing that his cryptocurrency platform Tron is investing $30 million in President-elect Donald Trump’s crypto project, World Liberty Financial.
