HONG KONG (Guardian) -- The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun has fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2 million (£4.88m) on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall – by eating the fruit.
At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.
“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun, who was born in China, said after getting his first taste. “It’s really quite good.”
Titled Comedian, the conceptual work created by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York last week, with Sun among seven bidders.
Sun said he felt “disbelief” in the first 10 seconds after he won the bid, before realizing “this could become something big”. In the 10 seconds after that, he decided he would eat the banana.
“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” he said on Friday.
The debut of the edible creation at the 2019 Art Basel show in Miami Beach sparked controversy and raised questions about whether it should be considered art – Cattelan’s stated aim.
On Friday, Sun compared conceptual art such as Comedian to NFT (non-fungible token) art and decentralized blockchain technology. “Most of its objects and ideas exist as (intellectual property) and on the internet, as opposed to something physical,” he said.
Sun also this week disclosed a $30 million investment in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency project backed by the U.S. president-elect, Donald Trump.
Sun was last year charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with offering and selling unregistered securities in relation to his crypto project Tron. The case is ongoing.
At a function room at the Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong, two men dressed as auction house staff stood in front of a featureless wall with the yellow banana offering the only splash of color.
Sun said he only recently decided to bid for the artwork, adding he had “dumb questions” such as whether the banana had decayed and how to value the work.
The banana was reportedly bought for less than a dollar from a fruit stall on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, staffed by Shah Alam, who works for $12 an hour.
When Alam learned from a New York Times reporter that the banana was resold as artwork for millions of dollars, he cried. “I am a poor man,” Alam, 74, told the paper. “I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money.”
Sun told the New York Times that Alam’s response was “poignant”.
Sun later pledged to buy 100,000 bananas from Alam’s stall and said the bananas would be distributed worldwide as “a celebration of the beautiful connection between everyday life and art”. Sun said he hoped to visit Alam’s stall one day in person.
The artwork owner is given a certificate of authenticity that it was created by Cattelan, as well as instructions about how to replace the fruit when it turned bad.
Attenders at Friday’s event each received a roll of duct tape and a banana as a souvenir. “Everyone has a banana to eat,” Sun said.