Sotheby’s Now and Contemporary evening sale on Wednesday didn’t border on the absurd, it dived headfirst into it as Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman of Europe, sold a banana duct-taped to a wall for $6.24 million. Minutes later, Chinese-born, New York–based cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun announced on X not only that he was the buyer of that work, Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), but that he would eat its centerpiece, the banana, “honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”
Even Barker struggled to keep a straight face as Sun (jostling on the phone through Jen Hua, the house’s deputy chairman for Asia) went head-to-head with six other bidders vying for the fruit stuck to a wall. “Looks like they’ve trodden on a banana skin,” Barker joked as Sun paused for thought halfway through the nearly 10-minute battle. Bidding started at $800,000 and he refused to accept increments smaller than $200,000. “Don’t let it slip away,” Barker implored in a bid to drive the price north, cueing rye groans from the crowd.
Scores of phones were held aloft to record the spectacle as the room bristled with a mixture of excitement and sheer bewilderment. Barker brought the gavel down to wild applause for a hammer price of $5.2 million, as the room seemed to celebrate Sotheby’s risk-taking decision to auction the work five years after it made headlines at Art Basel Miami Beach. Despite the fact it was one of 11 guaranteed lots, and therefore certain to sell, that it sold for more than four times its $1.5 million pre-sale estimate was no sure thing. Despite not being the evening’s top lot, in a sale that brought in $110.4 million, Comedian undoubtedly stole the show. (All figures reported here include buyer’s premium, unless noted otherwise.)
On top of this, Sotheby’s announced ahead of the sale that it would accept payment for Comedian in cryptocurrency; Sun said he plans to pay for with TRX, the cryptocurrency used on the blockchain platform TRON that he founded in 2014. With a reported net worth of $1.5 billion, his fruit purchase might seem like a $6 million marketing exercise for his crypto wares, but it’s worth noting that he has been actively buying at auction—and at a high level—for several years now.
But the seven-figure price of Cattelan’s Comedian shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, even if it’s a far cry from the most expensive works ever sold at auction. The readymade, of course, has its art historical bona fides but it is also market tested. Almost 30 years ago, a version of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, history’s most notorious readymade, sold for $2 million at Sotheby’s. In 2006, some 13 years before Cattelan, Urs Ficher presented an empty pack of cigarettes at that year’s Art Basel Miami Beach; the edition of two sold for $160,000 each. And earlier this week, at Christie’s, Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm, a shovel suspended from the ceiling went for about $3 million.
When asked ahead of Wednesday’s sale if Comedian’s auction were itself a parody of the art world, David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, replied, “There is an element of humor and absurdity—the artwork turns a mirror on the art market in a very precise way. It asks great questions, but it does so with great sincerity, not parody.”
Alex Glauber, the president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors and the founder of AWG Art Advisory, agreed saying that its sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday “completes the self-fulfilling prophecy—an artwork that interrogates the limits of art and how we value it gets debuted as an art fair and then resold for a staggering sum,” he told ARTnews.
The rest of the 46-lot sale by comparison was a bit tame. The $110.4 million total moved comfortably passing its low estimate of just over $100 million, with a sell-through rate of nearly 90 percent. The evening’s top lot was Ed Ruscha’s George’s Flag (1999) for $13.7 million, though that was well below the $68 million record that a 1964 Ruscha made at Christie’s on Tuesday night.
The evening’s other top lots were Stuart Davis’s Contranuities (1963), selling for $12.2 million and doubling the artist’s previous auction record; Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XXV (1982) for $10.9 million; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Red Kings (1981) for $7.2 million; and Richard Prince’s Nurse on Trial (2005) for $6.7 million.
Other works that broke the seven-figure mark included works by Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Christopher Wool, two sculptures by Yayoi Kusama, and another Ruscha painting, The Wrap-Up (1993), for $3 million. But works like Jeff Koon’s Woman in Tub (1998), which carried a $10 million to $15 million estimate, didn’t sell.
Six works by Roy Lichtenstein, and all consigned from the collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, added more than $18 million to the evening’s total result. The priciest of these was Nude with Bust (Study), from 1995, which made $4.6 million, while 1992’s Oval Office (Study), was the subject of a five-minute bidding war between five collectors before going for $4.2 million, quadrupling its estimate. His 1983 sculpture Sleeping Muse, of a Brancusi-like head, also fetched a similar price, $4.4 million.
Young artists whose works have become market darlings also saw strong results. Pol Taburet’s Buried on a Sunday (2021) set a new auction record for the artist at $156,000; Jadé Fadojutimi’s Taught Thought (2021) was sold for $780,000 as her stock continues to rise; a Louis Fratino still life, Anemones and Mimosas (2021), found a buyer at $312,000 against a high estimate of $150,000; and Hilary Pecis’s Bookshelf (2021), first exhibited at her 2022 show at Rachel Uffner Gallery, sold for $504,000.
Sotheby’s top brass was pleased post-sale. Lucius Elliot, head of contemporary marquee auctions, said in the period between securing consignments for the November auctions and actually selling them this week, the market had settled. “The market has felt more buoyant and stronger over the last few weeks than it did before the election when we were sourcing the works,” he told ARTnews. The state of the market aside, few people were talking about anything other than Cattelan’s banana as they exited the salesroom.
