Maurizio Cattelan's multi-million dollar banana eaten by a visitor

The security team was caught off guard this Saturday, July 12. At the Pompidou Center in Metz (Moselle), a visitor to the exhibition Un dimanche sans fin took down Comedian , the conceptual work by Maurizio Cattelan ... before devouring it. It's a banana attached to a white wall with gray adhesive tape. The whole thing is estimated to be worth several million dollars.

"The surveillance team intervened quickly and calmly, in accordance with internal procedures," the museum's communication said in a message sent to AFP, confirming information from the daily newspaper Le Républicain lorrain .

Fortunately, the perishable fruit is regularly replaced according to instructions given by the artist. According to the Centre Pompidou-Metz, contacted by Actu.fr , Maurizio Cattelan "regrets that the fruit is confused with the work itself: rather than eating the banana with its skin and its scotch, the visitor was content to consume the fruit."

The work, which was first presented by the Perrotin gallery in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, quickly became famous, generating as much admiration as criticism – can a piece of fruit taped to a wall be considered a work of art?

Despite the controversies, Comedian 's popularity grew. It exploded even more when Bulgarian artist David Datuna picked up and devoured the banana during his performance " Hungry Artist " on December 7, 2019.

The banana was also eaten by Chinese-American entrepreneur Justin Sun at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong in November 2024. He had acquired it a few days earlier at an auction in New York for the tidy sum of $6.2 million.