[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/cattelan-banana.png?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tOn Saturday, French museum Centre Pompidou-Metz sent out a curious media blast headed by two grainy images. The first depicted a ripe banana duct-taped to a blank white wall\u2014unmistakably, Maurizio Cattelan\u2019s viral artwork Comedian<\/em>\u2014and the second featuring just the duct-tape on the wall. The news: Cattelan\u2019s banana had been stolen from the eastern French museum.<\/p>\n \n\tIn reality, little was lost in the scuffle over the conceptual work. Per the museum, Staff replaced the fruit \u201cas quickly as possible\u201d with a fresh banana and a strip of tape, as they usually do about every three days. The value of the controversial piece, a limited edition of which famously sold at auction for $6.24 million in 2024, lies entirely in its certificate of authenticity and in \u201cthe protocol governing its presentation rather than its perishable element,\u201d explained the museum. As such, it said \u201cno irreversible damage was observed\u201d to the stolen, possibly eaten banana.<\/p>\n \n\tThe incident wasn\u2019t the first to befall the famed banana. When the artwork first appeared at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, a fairgoer ate the banana on the Saturday of the fair, claiming an act of performance art, and Perrotin, which was showing the work, removed it early on Sunday morning due to \u201cuncontrollable crowd movements.\u201d I.e. it was recieving too much attention, which one might think was exactly the point.<\/p>\n \n\tIn 2024, Chinese crypto-billionaire Justin Sun purchased the banana at Sotheby\u2019s New York for $6.2 billion. he then famously chomped down on the expensive snack in front of cameras, saying the act \u201ccan also become a part of the artwork\u2019s history.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n \n\tAnd just last year, another visitor to the Centre Pompidou-Metz couldn\u2019t resist the forbidden fruit. At the time, the artist commented that he was disappointed the hungry museumgoer had not eaten the tape and all.\u00a0 A museum-goer in Korea also ate the banana in 2023.<\/p>\n \n\t(ARTnew<\/em>s has reached out for a comment from the artist.)<\/p>\n \n\tNevertheless, the museum didn\u2019t appear to find much humor in this latest incident and, unlike the first time, announced it had filed a legal complaint against \u201cpersons unknown.\u201d The Centre-Pompidou Metz said it \u201ccondemns this act, which undermines the respect due to the works on display and temporarily deprives visitors of part of the experience offered by the exhibition.\u201d According to AFP<\/em> and Le Monde<\/em>, the museum later explained it was taking legal action because this was the second such incident, and the thief was unidentified, meaning \u201cthere is no possibility of dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe banana is the star of an exhibition on view until January 25, 2027, titled \u201cEndless Sunday: A Living Exhibition in Perpetual Motion,\u201d curated by Cattelan. According to a November-dated description, it \u201cchallenges the conventions of a traditional show to become a living, ever-changing project \u2014 a laboratory where masterpieces, unexpected creations, and subversive gestures play off each other and offer visitors a continually renewed experience.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBased on that description, it\u2019s hard not to wonder whether visitors who witnessed the headline-making fallout from the disappearing banana in person did in fact experience just what the show professes to offer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/maurizio-cattelan-comedian-banana-centre-pompidou-metz-1234787985\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/cattelan-banana.png?w=1024″] On Saturday, French museum Centre Pompidou-Metz sent out a curious media blast headed by two grainy images. The first depicted a ripe banana duct-taped to a blank white wall\u2014unmistakably, Maurizio Cattelan\u2019s viral artwork Comedian\u2014and the second featuring just the duct-tape on the wall. The news: Cattelan\u2019s banana had been stolen from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1967898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1967898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1967898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1967898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1967898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}