The $6 Million Banana’s Appeal

0:05Can you tell me the story of when you first heard about the banana? Okay, so my beginnings with the banana was the opening day of Art Basel, Miami Beach in 2019. That's our colleague Kelly Crowe, who covers the art market. Art Basel, Miami is a big high-end art fair that happens every December. Kelly was there walking around, checking out the sculptures and paintings. And then... I did see this banana duct-taped to a wall. And I saw a little half circle of people, I call them, you know, little looky-loos, just taking pictures of it. And they were not the types to buy the work. They were just having fun and posing and taking selfies with it.

0:50And I remember in that moment, like, oh, isn't that cute? But I logged it and then I moved on. So like you didn't get a selfie with the banana. I didn't get my selfie. Back in 2019, when it first showed up at Art Basel, Kelly and others in the art world were somewhat dismissive of the banana, which was listed for sale at$120 ,000. It seemed just like another quirky piece of contemporary art. She didn't think it would be that big of a deal. And we totally missed the point, which is that the entire rest of the art world thinks that the art world is an entire, you know, rigged game and a scam and a joke.

1:34And did the emperor, like, even wear clothes to the fair that day? Because somebody duct taped a banana to a wall and asked$120 ,000 for it. And that moment probably did need to stop and be reckoned with in real time.

1:51While Kelly brushed past it, lots of other people stayed and gawked. The banana duct taped to a wall became a viral sensation. And that was just the beginning. So over the past five years, the banana has gone on to have an incredibly strange afterlife. Several editions have sold, you know, between$120 ,000 and$150 ,000. One has since gotten donated to the Guggenheim, one of the most important museums in New York City. Others have gone on to become basically deified in meme form, and it ultimately culminated in an auction at Sotheby's. And I'm selling it here, the world's most expensive banana, at$5 ,200 ,000.

2:35These are words I never thought I'd say. $5 million for a banana.

2:42Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, December 6th.

2:55Coming up on the show, what one banana can tell us about the art market, the power of perception, and maybe even the economy.

3:19Okay, so before we dive into the flesh of the banana, can you explain exactly what this piece of art is? You want me to peel it back a little bit? Is that what you're asking me to do, right? Yes, please. Yeah, just, yeah. What does the banana tell us? Is that what you're asking? Who is on the banana phone, if you will? Well, let's try to run through all the puns we can possibly think of. We should. We have to, actually. I don't know why I wasn't more prepared with this. I don't want to slip up and miss any.

3:51Okay, so the piece is called Comedian. And what it actually is is a real banana and, you know, a stretch of duct tape. And it needs to be on a wall. But when you as the owner buy this piece, what you actually get are a 14 page list of instructions that sort of doubles as a certificate of authenticity. 14 pages? Yeah. Yeah, I think there are some illustrations. There's some illustrations. Okay. And what the artist wants to illustrate are a few of the rules that accompany the work. which means you go out and you buy your own banana and your own duct tape and you can create the work anywhere you want but it needs to be on a white wall it needs to be a certain number of inches up from the floor so roughly eye level the banana needs to be sort of arcing to the right not the left and it needs to be vertical so not like a smile it needs to be upright and then the duct tape has to be you know diagonal the instructions are closely guarded and the general public isn't allowed to see them.

4:55It also serves as the main proof of ownership. Are there instructions in there for what you're supposed to do when the banana eventually rots after like a few days? Yeah, after a few days, you take it down and you can put up another one. Yeah. Huh. It's ever evolving. What is stopping me from just going to the store and buying duct tape and a banana and taping it up at eye level and saying that I now own the banana art? So absolutely nothing, except that you could have done the same thing with, you know, a Campbell's can of tomato soup, but that doesn't make it a Warhol, right? So you don't have the version that the artist called art.

5:38The artist behind Comedian is a man named Maurizio Catalan. He's an Italian artist who became famous for creating outrageous works and sculptures, like a series of taxidermied horses hanging from a ceiling, and a statue of the Pope getting hit by a meteor. In 2011, Catalan told the art world he had retired. But he didn't stay on the sidelines for long. And in 2019, he got an idea. He's noticing that this sort of never-ending stream of art fairs just keeps getting more and more populated with big, splashy, abstract painting, figurative painting. And he starts to get annoyed that the entire art world is just sort of glomming onto all these splashy, pretty paintings.

6:22And where's the bite, right? Where's the provocation? And so he comes out of retirement to put this banana on the wall. And it really was kind of his like middle finger to the art market. He really was trying to say, look, you know, this entire fair is going to be brimming with pretty paintings. So why don't I just cut through all the noise of that, and I'll just do something simple and a little bit provocative, and I will put a banana on the wall, and I will call it art, and let's just see what sort of, you know, grenade goes off or not.

6:57The grenade definitely went off. Comedian went viral at that 2019 Art Basel. It drew massive crowds and got turned into memes and splashed onto t-shirts. Catalan made five versions of the banana, and each one sold. Why do you think this piece of art resonates so much with people? I think it was just funny. It was funny and simple and audacious. And the idea that an artist would call this art, the idea that it would have value, and the idea that other people would agree with him that it has value, there's just a level of absurdity there that he acknowledges. He was trying to lean into that. How did he feel about the fact that this middle finger was, like, being celebrated?

7:44I think he was, on the one hand, I'm sure very tickled because he had caused a stir, and that's really what he's always wanted to do as an artist, is sort of make waves and start a conversation. And I think he was certainly pleased, certainly pleased by that, because that is part of what he wanted to do was just to sort of shake things up a little bit, and he certainly did.

8:10After the break, the banana arrives in New York and tests a slippery art market.

8:30The banana hit the auction houses when people in the art market were feeling pretty rotten. It had been in a slump for about two years, with sales down across the board. Prices for the world's top artists have fallen by as much as half. So there are various reasons why art sells and doesn't sell. But the art market is cyclical like anything else, right? And there are certain years where everyone is feeling flush, and the world's wealthy feel like it's a good idea to buy and sell art at the very upper reaches and everything's fine and the art world feels like a party. And then there are things like war and elections and, you know, the pandemic and these macroeconomic factors that can cause collectors, even if they're the world's wealthiest people, these are billionaires.

9:16They have money in good markets and bad, right? They have it, but they feel a little sensitive to sort of splurge. It's a confidence game, right? How confident do they feel spending millions of dollars on art? And so the market's been sort of in a downturn for the last couple of years. And the auction houses, who are market makers, were probably behind doors. We're probably in a little bit of a panic of just like, how do we change this narrative? To do that, Sotheby's decided to look for a spectacle and approached one of the owners of Comedian. How do we make the idea of buying and selling art fun again?

9:53because this is meant to be kind of a respite for the world's wealthy, right? So I feel like it was really a marketing bonanza and sort of a stroke of genius on Sotheby's part to go out and seek this banana because they knew that it would change the narrative, or at least I think they hoped it did. How did the auction go? I mean, it was completely unforgettable. Was it bananas? It was bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Exactly. I've been humming that for days. So when I walked into the auction room, the anticipation was building, but people didn't have to wait too long. And the artworks kind of come out on this thing.

10:40Like, sort of the turntable sort of swiveled, right? And then out came this banana taped to the wall with one, you know, very tickled art handler standing there like Vanna White, you know, beside this banana. The viral sensation that has skyrocketed to universal recognition when it was first exhibited at the art bars on Miami Beach in December 2019. Maurizio Catalan's comedian. Here it is in all its splendor. And the scene was so ridiculous. Everyone's cell phones went up. It was like whoosh, this vertical whoosh of, I mean, cynical art dealers, folks who've been buying and selling art for decades.

11:19none of them could resist the urge to snap a little picture of that thing on the turntable did you did you put your phone up and take a picture of the banana oh dude you know i was already instagram living it i mean i was theirs yeah you got your did you get finally get your banana selfie yeah i finally got my moment with the dang banana i mean of course i had it with six or seven hundred people in this auction room don't let it slip away five million one hundred They're not getting these jokes. Five million what you do, but five million, one hundred thousand. Don't worry, Mr. Auctioneer. We got your jokes.

11:57There were seven different bidders for the banana. And eventually, one emerged as the winner. The Catalan is yours. Congratulations. Thank you very much indeed. After taxes and fees, the total bill was$6.2 million. The buyer said he intended to pay for it in cryptocurrency.

12:21Who bought the banana? So the winner of the banana is this young guy in his early 30s named Justin Sun. And he is the co-founder of a cryptocurrency platform called Tron. And he is a very colorful character who sort of came into the art world back in the beginning days of the NFT boom. You know, back when Beeple's, you know, JPEGs were selling for$70 million. You remember that, right, during the pandemic? So a lot of these guys sort of came into this world of collecting back then. And they sort of stuck around. Yeah, I was just going to say, in some ways, the banana reminds me of NFTs because an NFT, it's just this digital piece of art.

13:09But the thing that you own is the certificate that proves that you own it. And the banana is kind of the same way. You know, it's ephemeral, it's disposable, but it's the certificate that you have that says, I own that banana, that concept. Same thing. Yep. That clicked for him in big ways, and he found that very profound, that this artwork actually operated just like things on the blockchain do. And for him, that bridge, right, was so enticing, he just felt like he had to own it. After winning Comedian at the Sotheby's auction, Sun ate the banana at a livestream press conference. He said, quote, it's much better than other bananas.

13:51Comedian was one of many big sales in a surprisingly good month for the art world. November, which is usually an important bellwether for art markets, saw more than a billion dollars worth of art change hands at the world's auction houses. So what do you think this auction says about the state-of-the-art market right now? So it says, one, that it's not dead and that markets are always going to fluctuate and they're probably object-driven as much as they are. driven by these macroeconomic factors. But I think it definitely made this really fun. And for the auction houses, that's really important because they're meant to be this playground for the world's wealthy, right?

14:31And everyone is really closely tracking how the world's wealthy feel because if wealthy people feel like the economy is in an upward trajectory, they can really throw their weight around. And so I think people are maybe more cautiously optimistic about where the art market is going from here. And they have some fun track record to point to, you know, in the next go around.

14:57So, Kelly, if this banana sold for$6.2 million total, if you had$6.3 million, would you have bid on the banana? Oh, Ryan, that's not even a question I allow myself to go to. I'm a reporter. Yeah, I know I I do. It's like an impossible question for me. I think when I head to our Basel, Miami Beach, will I give some extra pause to any groups of people that I see loitering around anything? Yes, I will be more tempted to stop and make sure I'm not missing the banana boat, if you will. Well done. That was excellent. Any other final thoughts? Before we split? Yeah. The banana tells us, right, that the art market and the art world operate on an intellectual and comedic and financial plane that strike the rest of us as completely insane.

16:05And the truth is, like, if you're going to go and buy a piece of canvas and some tubes of oil paint and then slather it on a thing, it should probably only be worth, you know, a few dozen dollars. Like when you start to think about the materials that become art, it's just paint. But then we collectively as a society decide that that picture painted by like some guy named Pablo Picasso, right, turns out to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? Or Da Vinci, you know, like this is the whole construct of art is that we as a society decide to agree that something that maybe inherently has very minimal value, has a cultural value way outstripping the materials that were used to make it.

16:49And so that is kind of the bargain that we make with all artworks. It's just rarely that it's, you know, something that can rot after a few days.

17:15That's all for today. Friday, December 6th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Jonathan Davis, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphries, Matt Kwong, Kate Linebaugh, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singhi, Jivika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zemis, and me, Ryan Knudsen, with help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapak, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions.

18:01Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.

18:10Thanks for listening. See you Monday.