Nothing could be more contemporary than stealing a 6 million dollar work of art that, at its core, is a banana taped to a wall with silver duct tape.
That happened on Saturday at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in France. A security guard made his round at 2 in the afternoon and noticed that something was missing from the room: the famous ‘Comedian,’ by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, had lost its only visible element. Someone had torn off the fruit and left. The museum filed the corresponding report, condemned the incident with all the institutional seriousness it could muster… and then went to the market. A few hours later, the work had been restored with a new banana, exactly like the previous one, just as the piece’s official protocol indicates.
And the real value of ‘Comedian’ is not in the fruit — which is replaced every three days when it rots — but in the certificate of authenticity. The thief left with a banana. The art remains on the wall.