Crypto billionaire eats the world-famous banana he paid $6.2M for

It seemed crazy enough to have payed over 6 million dollars for a banana, but then, crypto billionaire Justin Sun, drew even more attention to himself by eating the famous artwork he just spent millions on.

At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and sayin it was “much better than other bananas,” The Guardian reported.

Sun added that eating the banana at a press conference “can also become a part of the artwork’s history.”

Just a couple of days before, at the New York headquarters of the auction house Sotheby's, Sun had won the bidding for the work titled 'Comedian', by the well-known Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.

Photo: X - Sotheby's

According to The New York Times, the banana was bought for less than a dollar from a fruit stall on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, staffed by Shah Alam, who works for $12 an hour.

When an NYT reporter told Alam that the banana was resold as artwork for millions of dollars, he cried. “I am a poor man,” Alam, 74, told the paper. “I have never seen this kind of money,” he said.

Sun later told the NYT he would buy 100,000 bananas from Alam’s stall and said they would be distributed worldwide as “a celebration of the beautiful connection between everyday life and art”.

According to The Guardian, as well as the now-eaten banana, Sun bought the rights to recreate the artwork by duct-taping any banana to a wall and calling it ‘Comedian’, though he has not yet said if he plans to do so.

Photo: Instagram - Cattelan Banana

The artwork has sparked controversy since its debut in the  2019 Art Basel show in Miami, raising questions about whether it should be considered art.

Photo: Instagram - Cattelan Banana

However, Sun says that it is not “just a simple piece of art,” but “a cultural phenomenon that unites the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community," he said on X.

Photo: Instagram - Cattelan Banana

Similarly, according to the artist himself, the work 'Comedian' is a creative critique of the speculation of the art market, designed to make the viewer ask themselves: "On what basis does an object acquire value in the art system?"

Never miss a story! Click here to follow The Daily Digest.