Justin Sun, founder of a Chinese cryptocurrency platform that sold Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” artwork, which is a banana taped to a wall, for $6.2 million at auction, kept his promise and ate the banana at a press conference in Hong Kong.
Drawing similarities between conceptual artworks such as “Comedian” and NFT art and the blockchain system, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, Sun said, “Most of these objects and their ideas exist on the internet, as opposed to something physical.”
Catelan’s “Comedian” was first exhibited at Art Basel in Miami, Florida, USA, in 2019, where it was sold for $120,000. It was eaten by performance artist David Datuna, was quickly replaced with a new one and was eaten again by a student who said he was hungry at the Leeum Art Museum in South Korea in 2023.
TR