Justin Sun is an old acquaintance of the press. Networker block chain TRON, former member of the popular “30 under 30” list Forbes and as prime minister of the microstate of Liberland, a latter position that gives him more visibility than actual influence, Sun has been making headlines for some time. Some also upset him, such as when the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission accused him of fraud. But this Friday crypto king We called the press and influencers in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong to do something that has little to do with his role as a businessman or bureaucrat.

He ate a banana.

Under the watchful eyes of journalists and the flashes of cameras, Sun fought proudly and I ate a banana He later admitted that it tasted “much better” than anything he had ever tried before. It sounds crazy that something like this would attract press attention and make headlines on the BBC network. Guard any New York Times. Or at least that was the case until a basic piece of information became available: days earlier, Justin had paid a whopping $6.2 million for the same banana.

This isn’t fruit, it’s art

To understand this, you have to go back a week or so to when Sotheby’s held arguably its largest art auction in New York. unbelievable This year has been crazy so far. Not because of the amount of offers. The work sold at auction was awarded for $6.2 million, including commissions; This was a fairly high sum, but it was far from the amount paid for canvases of questionable authorship.

No. The surprising thing was this: offered piece. As seven different people engaged in a counter-bidding war, each bidding higher, what Sotheby’s employees were protecting was nothing more or less than a banana. To be more precise, a ripe banaba taped to the wall with the same packing tape you can find in most hardware stores on the planet.

There’s a very simple reason why a piece of fruit ended up at a Sotheby’s auction with a starting price of $800,000 and a sales estimate of between 1 and 1.5 million, well below the 6.2 million Sun was able to pay to win the bid. The banana wasn’t actually a banana. This was art.

The banaba in question had been purchased for less than 40 cents at a street stall in Manhattan that same morning, but it was the fact that it had been used in the recreation of an original work called ‘The Comedian’ that caused its value to increase exponentially within a few hours. ‘ and nothing more or less than that: a banana 160 centimeters above the ground, clearly attached to the wall with adhesive tape.

Its author is the already known Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. other controversial worksFor example, Pope John II. ‘La Nona Ora’, representing John Paul’s meteorite impact, or ‘America’, a fully functional toilet made of 18 carat gold. In line with the same provocation and with the intention of presenting a satire on the art market, Cattelan decided many years ago to stick a banana on a wall and call it ‘The Comedian’.

The work was presented at the Art Basel fair in Miami. According to Sotheby’s, three printings of “Comedian” were made, in addition to “two of the artist’s proofs,” and the Perrotin gallery sold the pieces for more than a respectable sum, although it was a far cry from the amount paid in November. New York: $120,000 to $150,000.

This created expectation. And mayhem. As if this work wasn’t already provocative, it gained further notoriety in late 2019 when another artist, David Datuna, peeled one of Cattelan’s bananas off the wall and ate it on camera.

Datuna assured that this was his own performance based on the Italian’s work. This only served to make the irreverent ‘Comedian’ even more popular. Against this backdrop, one of these bananas arrived at Sotheby’s this fall, and with a new version of the script, Chinese-born crypto king Justin Sun decided to check it out. $6.2 million.

It may seem like a lot, but Sotheby’s knew how to sell it: It placed it on the same level as Édouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’ or Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’; It was a urinal that shook the art world at the time. Introduced in 1917.

The story of ‘The Comedian’ could have ended here. Millionaire brooch for a shocking story. But Sun decided to go further and announced plans to eat bananas through X immediately after agreeing to pay 6.2 million for the bananas. Last Friday he brought together dozens of journalists and influencers He’s in the function room of the exclusive Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, and has he made good on his threat? He swallowed the banana.

“Eating it during a press conference could also be part of the history of the artwork,” he said. crypto entrepreneur before making sure the fruit in question is “much better than other bananas”. Still, he gave each of the participants a banana and a roll of adhesive tape.

The story is completed with another chapter written thousands of kilometers away from the Hong Kong hotel where Sun devoured Cattelan’s work. At a fruit stand in the Bronx, not far from the room where Sotheby’s auctioned the work, the bananas used to recreate the copy of ‘Comedian’ that Sun purchased were purchased. They sold there for a fraction of the 6.2 million bid – TNYT had initially published it at 35 cents, which was later reduced to 25 cents.

A few days ago journalists New York Times They visited the stall in question and met to talk to the seller, who sold the banana for 0.00000004% of its value at Sotheby’s that same night. A 74-year-old Bangladeshi elderShah Alam is dedicated to selling fruit in Manhattan.

His reaction when he learned of the rapid change in the value of bananas was “impressive,” according to the New York newspaper. “I am a poor man,” Alam admitted: “I have never had this much money, I have never seen this amount.”

These words must have excited Sun because he once again applied for the X account and launched another shocking announcement: he was going to buy 100,000 bananas at Alam’s booth and then hand them out for free. So at $0.25 per unit, that’s $25,000 worth of bananas.

That sounds good, but a few days ago Alam admitted to TNYT that the reality for a street fruit vendor in the Bronx was very different: It would cost him thousands of dollars to buy 100,000 bananas, then he would face the challenge of transporting them to his stand, and ultimately the real profit of the business would be It would be much lower, but $6,000.

Needless to say, Alam is not the owner of the street stall, but rather one of seven employees who work grueling shifts for the owner of the stall, who has another business dedicated to selling fruits.

The ironies of the art world. And Sunday.

Logically, Sun did not pay $6.2 million for a banana and auction commissions. He paid for a certificate that gave him the right to stick a banana against a wall in a certain way and then claim that it was called ‘The Comedian’ and was a work by the controversial Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.

actually fruit nothing special. It is not treated. No one has ever looked for a way to preserve the original piece. Each fruit rots and needs to be replaced with a similar one. In fact, along with the banaba and the certificate, Sun also received a manual with instructions on how to do this.

It’s unknown whether Sun will use his title to stick another banana on a gray-taped wall and call him ‘The Comedian,’ but for now his $6.2 million investment has helped him gain significant fame and visibility around the world. related to crypto securities. He also compared Cattelan’s banana to NFTs, which are digital works of art that have no intrinsic value despite being able to fetch millions of dollars.

Coincidence or not, Sun also took advantage of the fame the banana had brought him to reveal the company’s investment. 30 million dollars In a cryptocurrency project called World Liberty Financial.

Images |Sotheby’s and Justin Sun (X)

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