An art installation featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall has been spoiled by an artist, who removed the fruit, peeled it and ate it amid a bunch of art freaks at the Art Basel Miami gallery in Florida. The artwork recently sold three pieces for £90,000 each.
The incident took place on the last day of the exhibition, which saw some hubbub because of a banana that changed color and almost spoiled, after being fixed to the wall with duct tape.
Surprisingly, three buyers actually paid between 90,000 and 115,000 pounds last week, for three copies of the artwork named "Comedian" by artist Maurizio Cattelan. He displayed the three copies with a certificate of authenticity and exchange, but, it would have been better to include a notice reading "For display only."
Last Saturday, before noon, the New York-based artist David Datuna pulled the banana from the wall and ate it. A video shared by Datuna himself on Instagram showed him smiling broadly, raising the banana and happily eating it as if it was a glass of wine.
Another video, posted on Twitter, showed a crowd of stunned people taking pictures of him on their mobile phones, and then he left the room.
But a spokeswoman for the Perrotin Gallery, which displayed Cattelan's artwork, said in an interview on Saturday that the exhibition had taken no action against Datuna. She also said everyone is in good spirits, and that the gallery does not plan to file any legal complaint in this regard.
Exhibition curators have replaced the banana with another, saying that the artwork was not destroyed and that the fruit was just an "idea."