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—unmistakably, Maurizio Cattelan’s viral artwork Comedian—and the second featuring just the duct-tape on the wall. The news: Cattelan’s banana had been stolen from the eastern French museum.
In reality, little was lost in the scuffle over the conceptual work. Per the museum, Staff replaced the fruit “as quickly as possible” 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 “the protocol governing its presentation rather than its perishable element,” explained the museum. As such, it said “no irreversible damage was observed” to the stolen, possibly eaten banana.
The incident wasn’t 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 “uncontrollable crowd movements.” I.e. it was recieving too much attention, which one might think was exactly the point.
In 2024, Chinese crypto-billionaire Justin Sun purchased the banana at Sotheby’s New York for $6.2 billion. he then famously chomped down on the expensive snack in front of cameras, saying the act “can also become a part of the artwork’s history.”
And just last year, another visitor to the Centre Pompidou-Metz couldn’t resist the forbidden fruit. At the time, the artist commented that he was disappointed the hungry museumgoer had not eaten the tape and all. A museum-goer in Korea also ate the banana in 2023.
(ARTnews has reached out for a comment from the artist.)
Nevertheless, the museum didn’t appear to find much humor in this latest incident and, unlike the first time, announced it had filed a legal complaint against “persons unknown.” The Centre-Pompidou Metz said it “condemns 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.” According to AFP and Le Monde, the museum later explained it was taking legal action because this was the second such incident, and the thief was unidentified, meaning “there is no possibility of dialogue.”
The banana is the star of an exhibition on view until January 25, 2027, titled “Endless Sunday: A Living Exhibition in Perpetual Motion,” curated by Cattelan. According to a November-dated description, it “challenges the conventions of a traditional show to become a living, ever-changing project — a laboratory where masterpieces, unexpected creations, and subversive gestures play off each other and offer visitors a continually renewed experience.”
Based on that description, it’s 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.
