The auctioneer could barely conceal his laughter as he banged his gavel. He had just sold Comedian - an artwork consisting of a normal banana duct taped to a wall - for $5.2m (£3.96m). Once fees were added the full price was £5m.¹

The buyer was cryptocurrencyA digital currency in which transactions are verified and records maintained by a decentralised system using cryptography, rather than by a centralised authority. billionaire Justin Sun, founder of blockchainA secure database which records transactions, especially cryptocurrency transactions. platform Tron and owner of file-sharing app BitTorrent. Sun is a maverick. He has been accused of manipulating the crypto market to benefit his own assets.²

He announced that he planned to eat the banana. If his bites are average sized, each might be worth $1m (£794,000).

Comedian was created by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. His other works include a fully functioning toilet made of 24-carat gold, a sculpture of the PopeThe bishop of Rome and the head of the worldwide Catholic Church. being hit by an asteroid and a football team he assembled of Senegalese workers in Italy.

Comedian was first shown at a Miami art fair in 2019. Cattelan bought his bananas for 30 cents at a grocery store. He sold two versions of the work for $120,000 (£95,000) each and donated a third to the Guggenheim Museum.

Sun has not just bought a banana and some tape. The main part of the sale is a certificate of authenticity. This grants him the right to recreate the artwork whenever he wants. 

The sale of Comedian joins a long list of transgressive and bizarre art sales. In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni claimed to fill 90 tin cans with his own faeces. One of them sold for €275,000 (£229,000) in 2016.

In 2014, Tracey Emin's My Bed - a bed the artist slept in while depressed in the 1990s - sold for £2.5m art auction house Christie's. Five years later, Christie's sold a grid of copper and steel bricks by the minimalist artist Carl Andre for £2.4m. In 2021, the NFTNon-fungible tokens are digital tokens that represent ownership of unique items. They can be bought and traded online.  of a work by the digital artist Beeple went for $69.3m (£54.8m).³

Some think Sun is a fool. A great painting like the Mona Lisa is valuable in part because of the skill used to create it. Comedian is a banana and some duct tape.

Yet others believe Comedian makes a bold point. Cattelan reveals how stupid the art market is, they say. He shows us how we have forgotten the real value of things. This makes it a powerful work.

Has he gone bananas?

Yes: Sun may be immensely wealthy. But even for someone with his resources, buying a banana for £5m is ludicrousAbsurd or ridiculous. Ludicrous originally meant to play or jest, from the Latin ludus: play, sport.. Like many viral moments, Comedian will soon be forgotten. He will regret his involvement.

No: Art moves faster than society. Monet and Van Gogh were not understood at first, but now they are seen as greats. Sun and Cattelan both have a vision. Comedian will enter the history books.

Or... It is not Sun who is bananas. It is the world itself. We live in a world riven with injustice and inequality. But instead of fighting it, we expend time and money pondering a banana taped to a wall.