He paid $6.2 million for a banana taped to a wall—and then he ate it. Justin Sun followed through on his promise to eat the banana at the center of Maurizio Cattelan's infamous "Comedian" artwork on Friday after logging the highest bid for the work at a Sotheby's auction in New York last week. The 34-year-old cryptocurrency entrepreneur ate the banana, purchased from a Manhattan fruit cart for 35 cents shortly before the sale, in front of journalists and influencers at a Hong Kong luxury hotel, per the Guardian. "It's much better than other bananas," Sun said of the fruit, per AFP. "It's really quite good." He then vowed to buy 100,000 bananas from Shah Alam, the fruit vendor who cried when he learned the price his banana had fetched.
Sun said the bananas would be distributed for free as "a celebration of the beautiful connection between everyday life and art." He drew connections between conceptual art, non-fungible token art, and cryptocurrency, noting "most of its objects and ideas exist as [intellectual property] and on the internet, as opposed to something physical," per the Guardian. He also suggested the price of his "Comedian," one of three existing versions, would "go up even more in the future, just like Bitcoin." The work was sold with instructions for how to replace the banana when it goes bad or, in this case, is eaten. Sun, who is facing fraud charges in the US over his crypto project Tron, then gave each attendee a banana and roll of duct tape of their own. (More art stories.)
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