A Banana Duct-Taped To A Wall Sold For $5.2 Million At Auction—Why?

A yellow banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction tonight. Let that sink in. If you’re slightly baffled, congratulations—you’re in on the punchline. That’s exactly what Maurizio Cattelan, the artist and provocateur behind Comedian, intended. Cattelan has long been a master of challenging the norms of the art world. From his golden toilet (America) to his suspended taxidermy animals, he’s built a career on art that’s as much about the reaction as the object itself.

The real star of this artwork isn’t the banana; it’s you and your reaction. And let’s face it, since its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, this banana has driven the art world bananas.

As a kid, I watched my mom haggle in the bustling markets of Tunisia and Morocco, where we lived. There, I learned a simple truth: the value of a good is what someone is willing to pay for it. But Comedian operates beyond supply and demand. Its power lies in making us question the very idea of value, especially in the art world, where meaning and absurdity often share a wall.

What makes this banana different from the one browning on your counter? The intention behind it. A banana becomes art when it’s duct-taped to a wall in galleries like Perrotin and White Cube, its value secured not by materials but by the concept it represents. Buyers aren’t purchasing produce—they’re buying the idea, along with the rights to recreate Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian as an authentic work.

Cattelan once said, “Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary on what we value.” He forces us to confront how we define value and meaning by turning simple materials into art. It’s absurd, yes, but also profound—a slapstick critique of the question: what makes something art?

That question lies at the heart of the subjective theory of value, the long-debated economic principle from the late 19th century. Pioneered by thinkers like Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras, it maintains that the value of an object isn’t fixed by labor, time, or materials but is determined by context and perception. A bottle of water costs a dollar at the corner store, but stranded in the middle of the desert, it becomes priceless.

Comedian, by selling first for $120,000–$150,000 in 2019 and now expected to break the million-dollar mark, agrees with this subjective theory of value, highlighting the sometimes arbitrary nature of art pricing. The value of Comedian lies in the meaning and discourse it generates—but it’s certainly not the first work of art to do so.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp turned a porcelain urinal into art with Fountain, challenging the traditional confines of the art world at the time. Artist’s Shit, the 1961 anti-artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni, sought to do the same; the work consisted of 90 tin cans, each reportedly filled with 30 grams of feces. Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde and Banksy’s self-shredding painting both tested the boundaries of art and spectacle. Like these works, Comedian doesn’t just sit on a wall—it laughs at the walls themselves.

These works share a spirit of rebellion, poking at the edges of tradition and asking audiences to rethink what art is. Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian takes its place among these iconoclastic milestones. As Cattelan himself put it in an interview with The Art Newspaper in 2021, “I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules.”

Like his contemporaries and predecessors who share a legacy of art historical dissidence, the real power of Comedian isn’t in the arbitrary materials—it’s in the response it provokes. Maurizio Cattelan knew this when he said, “I am always at risk of making a fool of myself because if no one reacts to the work then it would not work.” The artwork’s success hinges entirely on how it’s received: the gasps, the laughs, the debates.

Art like Comedian acts as a reflection of society’s values, simultaneously serious and ridiculous. The art world, like the artwork itself, exists in a delicate balance of elitism and absurdity, meaning and nonsense. So, do we value Comedian because of what it says about art—or because of what it says about us? Maybe, as Andy Warhol suggested, “Art is whatever you can get away with.” And maybe, we let them get away with it.

By reducing the medium to something as absurdly mundane as a piece of fruit and duct tape, Comedian forces us to confront the art market’s fragile systems of value. It asks: Is the joke on the art world, the audience, or both?