Why People Cannot Stop Stealing Maurizio Cattelan’s $6.2 Million Banana Artwork

Art enthusiasts are completely losing their minds over yet another high-profile fruit heist. The legendary and highly controversial contemporary art installation by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, titled Comedian—which simply features a single yellow banana taped securely to a gallery wall—has once again been targeted by thieves. The incident unfolded at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in eastern France, where a security officer suddenly noticed the multi-million-dollar piece of produce had vanished from its display on Saturday, May 30.

The museum did not wait around to see if the culprit would return the stolen snack. AFP reported that the institution quickly contacted local law enforcement and submitted a formal criminal lawsuit against the unidentified perpetrators on May 31. Representatives for the museum explicitly stated that the legal escalation was a matter of “respect for art.” However, resolving the visual gap on the wall proved incredibly easy. As documented by Artnews, gallery employees simply grabbed a fresh piece of fruit and a fresh strip of silver adhesive to fix the exhibition right up. Curators explained that the physical asset itself isn’t what holds the value; rather, the true multi-million-dollar value lies in the official certificate of authenticity and the strict guidelines dictating how it must be showcased.

This clever setup makes total sense given the mind-boggling financial history behind the piece. While Cattelan originally bought the baseline fruit for mere pennies from a Manhattan street merchant named Shah Alam, the installation became a global phenomenon when cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun purchased an edition for a stunning $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction in late 2024. Sun later made international news by publicly eating the snack at a Hong Kong media gathering, comparing the conceptual stunt to a digital crypto token.

This recent French robbery is merely the latest chapter in a long line of literal food critics taking a bite out of Cattelan’s vision. Performance artist David Datuna infamously swallowed the original Art Basel Miami centerpiece back in 2019 as part of a stunt he called “Hungry Artist.” In 2023, a college aesthetics major named Noh Hyun-soo unpeeled and consumed the fruit at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art simply because he skipped breakfast, cheekily taping the empty skin back onto the wall as a joke. To make matters even wilder, another ravenous visitor had already devoured the fruit at this exact same French venue just last year.