Capital Economy, Business and Finance
They normally cost about 16p. But on Wednesday, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur paid 40 million times that for a banana at a contemporary art auction in New York. Justin Sun, founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron, outbid six others in a packed Sotheby’s auction room to buy the fruit for $6.2 million. Titled Comedian, the banana is stuck to a wall with duct tape. The artwork was first created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2019. Son was sued by US regulators last year for allegedly inflating the trading volumes of his Tron crypto token. He denies the charges. On Wednesday he claimed Comedian represented “a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes and the cryptocurrency community”. He revealed he planned to eat the banana in the “coming days... honouring its place in both art history and popular culture.”
