At Art Basel Miami in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to the grey wall of Perrotin gallery's booth in silver tape and called it *Comedian*. Three editions sold for between $120,000 and $150,000; what was sold was not the banana but a 'certificate' signed by Cattelan and instructions for the work's reinstallation. The banana is replaced every few days.

On 20 November 2024, Sotheby's New York put one edition up for auction. The estimate was $1–1.5 million; bidding leapt to $5.2 million, reaching $6,240,000 with the buyer's premium. The buyer: Justin Sun, founder of the crypto platform Tron. Payment was made in cryptocurrency.

Days after the purchase, at a press event in Hong Kong, Sun took the banana off the wall and ate it in front of the cameras. 'The most expensive banana I have ever eaten,' he said. The gesture matched the logic of Cattelan's work exactly: the work was not the banana — it was the conceptual arrangement which knew that the banana itself could be eaten; Sun's eating it became a 'performance' of the work, not its destruction.

The event is a turning point on several axes. First, that the price of a banana could pass $6 million — proof that the art market's notion of value had fully detached from the object. Second, the sale being made with crypto wealth — the second great step, after the 2021 Beeple sale, of digital fortune returning to the traditional art market. Third, the eating of the work — the most extreme test of the question of whether a work exists once its object is gone. Cattelan had defined the work by certificate; Sun proved it by eating.

Institutional art criticism read this transaction as the final stage of spectacle: the gallery–auction-house–social-media chain turns the work into a consumer commodity; Cattelan ironises that chain and carries it inside the work. *Comedian* is not a banana — it is a mirror the art world holds up to its own economy.