Peeling the $6.2 Million Banana: An Auction Explainer
It wasn’t just a banana. It was a banana with a back story.
The spectacle on Wednesday evening, when a Sotheby’s auctioneer in Manhattan warned potential bidders not to let Maurizio Cattelan’s fruity artwork “slip away,” ended with a duct-taped banana selling for an astonishing $6.2 million, with fees.
A crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun placed the winning bid from Hong Kong, adding Cattelan’s 2019 conceptual artwork, titled “Comedian,” to the quirky collection he has amassed over the last few years that includes a Giacometti sculpture, a Picasso painting and a very expensive NFT of a pet rock.
But winning the auction is really just the beginning of the negotiations that will take place over the next month or so (a buyer typically has 30 days to pay, by which time the banana will inevitably blacken and rot). In a phone interview this week, Sun said that he intended to pay for the banana with his own invented cryptocurrency; however, Sotheby’s might only accept payment through more popular forms of digital payment like Bitcoin or Ethereum.