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Carlie Porterfield
21 November 2024
`The world's most expensive banana’: Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian fetches $6.2m at Sotheby’s New York. The buyer, the collector and crypto investor Justin Sun, immediately vowed to eat the banana.
The most talked-about lot of the New York auction season, the duct-taped banana by Maurizio Cattelan, sold for a hammer price of $5.2m ($6.2m with fees) at Sotheby’s New York after a seven-minute bidding war.
Comedian (2019), which consists of a banana attached to a wall with silver duct tape, came to the block Wednesday (20 November) at Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary auction. The winning bid far exceeded the auction house’s $1m to $1.5m estimate.
Bidders drove the price up to $5.2m before a winner emerged, with a Chinese buyer on the phone with Jen Hua, the deputy chairman of Sotheby's Asia, outdueling online bidders. Sotheby’s said after the sale that the buyer was Justin Sun, a Chinese collector and founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron. Sun has previously bid on other splashy auction lots, including buying a $78m Giacometti sculpture at Sotheby's in 2021 and, he claims, narrowly missing out on Beeple's record-breaking NFT (non-fungible token) earlier that same year.
Comedian "represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community", Sun said in a statement through Sotheby's after purchasing the lot. "I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history." Sun plans to eat the banana, he added, as a way of "honouring its place in both art history and popular culture".
Sotheby's said before the sale that the auction house would accept cryptocurrency for the work and confirmed that Sun will pay in crypto, though it did not specify which currency. |
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Post time 23-11-2024 07:49 PM
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