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Someone Stole a Banana Duct-Taped to the Wall of a French Museum. One of Its Twins Fetched More Than $6 Million at Auction
Key takeaways
- Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
- The unknown thief seemingly took this message to heart.
- Fortunately for the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the theft does not constitute any great financial loss.
Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
Add as preferred source Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan Kena Betancur / AFP / Getty Images Not for the first time, one of the world’s most expensive bananas—the centerpiece of an infamous contemporary artwork—was stolen from a French museum over the weekend.
Duct-taped to a wall inside the Centre Pompidou-Metz in eastern France, the banana is the fruit de résistance of Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual piece Comedian, which is perhaps best-known for fetching $6.2 million at a 2024 auction. An edition of the artwork hangs as part of the museum’s “Endless Sunday” exhibition co-curated by Cattelan and “conceived as a shifting mise-en-scene” that “resists permanence, unfolding through a series of appearances, disappearances and inversions,” according to a museum statement about the show.