Man eats banana duct-taped to wall that had sold for $120K at Miami art event
Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" presented by Perrotin Gallery and on view at Art Basel Miami 2019 at Miami Beach Convention Center on December 6, 2019 in Miami Beach, Florida. Two of the three editions of the piece, which feature a banana duct-taped t
MIAMI - A banana that was duct-taped to a wall in an art gallery -- a "work of art" that had already sold for $120,000 -- was taken down and eaten by a man on Saturday.
The banana at Art Basel in Miami, Florida, was brown and aging when a man named David Datuna walked up, pulled it down, peeled it and ate it, TMZ reported.
Datuna, who calls himself a performance artist, was escorted by security to a private room, though he said he was not arrested, according to the Miami Herald.
The work of art, titled "The Comedian," was created by Maurizio Cattelan. It had been purchased by an art collector in France.
A patron at the gallery offered their own banana to the gallery owner, who re-adhered the borrowed fruit to the wall.
Two of the three editions of the banana artwork sold for $120,000 at the Art Basel Miami festival and a third is expected to fetch $150,000, Miami's WSVN reported.
Cattelan said he'd been working on the "The Comedian" for a year and initially wanted to create a bronze banana.
“Wherever I was traveling I had this banana on the wall. I couldn’t figure out how to finish it,” he told Art Net News. "In the end, one day I woke up and I said, ‘The banana is supposed to be a banana.'”
The artist is also behind the gold toilet offered to the White House on loan by New York City's prestigious Guggenheim Museum. The museum rejected a request to display Van Gogh's 1888 "Landscape With Snow" work in the residence and proposed the toilet instead.
In an August 2017 blog post, Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector said "Trump is synonymous with golden toilets."
FOX News and FOX 32 Chicago contributed to this report.