Comedian, Maurizio Cattelan’s instant classic, sold for more than quadruple some estimates at Sotheby’s this week. How one work, and its worth, both satirizes and explains the meme-y days ahead.

Turns out that crypto bros love “Comedian,” Maurizio Cattelan’s now-infamous work consisting of a banana with duct tape, a spoof of art-world capitalism.

Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian," a banana duct-taped to a wall, was sold at Sotheby's in New York on Wednesday for $6.2 million.

Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, was a phenomenon when it debuted in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach.

If you thought the first price tag on Maurizio Cattelan’s viral banana duct-taped to a wall installation was obscene. This one might make you go bananas.

A banana taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million at an art auction in New York on Wednesday, with the winning bid coming from a prominent cryptocurrency entrepreneur. The piece of conceptual art consisted of a simple banana,

The work, called Comedian, was unveiled at Art Basel in Miami in 2019, where it was promptly eaten by performance artist David Datuna. At another exhibition at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art in 2023, the banana was eaten again.

The controversial work, which instantly went viral when it debuted at Art Basel in 2019, beat estimates several times over.