After spending $6.2 million (£4.88 million) on an artwork that featured a banana duct-taped to a wall, bitcoin entrepreneur Justin Sun has kept his word by eating the fruit. aAfter praising the piece as “iconic” and drawing comparisons between bitcoin and conceptual art, Sun, 34, choked down on the banana in front of hundreds of journalists and influencers at one of Hong Kong’s most expensive hotels. After tasting it for the first time, Sun, a Chinese native, declared, “It’s much better than other bananas.” “It’s actually pretty good.”
Sun was one of seven bidders for the conceptual piece, Comedian, which was made by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York last week. After winning the offer, Sun claimed to have been in “disbelief” for the first ten seconds before realizing “this could become something big.” He made the decision to eat the banana in the ten seconds that followed. He stated on Friday that “eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history.” The edible creation’s 2019 Art Basel show debut in Miami Beach caused controversy and prompted debate about whether it qualified as art, which was Cattelan’s declared goal.
On Friday, Sun contrasted decentralized blockchain technology and NFT (non-fungible token) art with conceptual art like Comedian. “Instead of something tangible, the majority of its items and concepts exist as (intellectual property) and on the internet,” he stated. This week, Sun also revealed a $30 million investment in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency initiative supported by Donald Trump, the US president-elect.
In connection with his cryptocurrency project Tron, Sun was accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission last year of issuing and selling unregistered securities. The matter is still pending. Two men dressed as auction house employees stood in front of a blank wall in a function room at the Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong, with the yellow banana serving as the only color accent. Sun stated that he only just made the decision to bid on the piece of art, adding that he had “dumb questions” about how much the piece was worth and whether the banana had rotted. Shah Alam, a $12-an-hour employee at a fruit stand on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is said to have sold the banana for less than a dollar.
Upon hearing from a reporter for the New York Times that the banana had been resold for millions of dollars as artwork, Alam broke down in tears. The 74-year-old Alam told the newspaper, “I am a poor man.” “This type of money has never been mine or seen by me before.” Sun called Alam’s remark “poignant” in an interview with the New York Times.
Later, as “a celebration of the beautiful connection between everyday life and art,” Sun promised to purchase 100,000 bananas from Alam’s stall and distribute them all across the world. “I hope to visit Alam’s,” Sun stated. In addition to instructions on how to change the fruit when it goes bad, the owner of the artwork receives a certificate of authenticity attesting to Cattelan’s creation. Sun allegedly purchased the rights to reproduce the artwork by duct-taping any banana to a wall and naming it Comedian, in addition to the now-eaten banana. Sun hasn’t stated whether he intends to do so yet. As a memento, each person who attended the ceremony on Friday was given a banana and a roll of duct tape. Sun declared, “Everyone has a banana to eat.”
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