The $120,000 banana, for those of you who are unfamiliar, was an art installation duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach, courtesy of Maurizio Cattelan, an artist whose many famed projects include an 18-karat solid gold toilet called America, and a painting of Pope John Paul II getting hit by a meteorite. The New York Times reports that the banana, titled Comedian, made quite a splash, with crowds of people pushing toward it in hopes of getting an Instagram photo with a piece of rotting fruit.
Someone did buy the banana, according to the Guardian, yet someone else ate it: performance artist David Datuna, who claimed he was “hungry.” This move was probably good for Datuna’s brand and future name recognition, but certainly bad for his taste buds. Why?
The banana, you see, had been hanging on that wall at Art Basel for at least three days before Datuna put it in his mouth. It was spotty when it first went up, which suggests it had already had a few days to ripen, and a banana’s shelf life outside of a refrigerator is short. Indeed, SFGate.com reports that it takes only three to four days for a banana to fully ripen; the tell-tale sign that a banana is ready for consumption is if the peel is yellow and lightly freckled, but once the spots start to set in, the banana’s time is at its end. A fully ripe banana only lasts for five to 7 days inside a refrigerator, and one can only imagine that outside a fridge, in a hot and humid place like Miami, that clock is sped up.
With that information in mind, I can only presume that the banana Datuna ate was overripe, and therefore putrid (at least to my taste buds, and as stated previously, in this blog post only my taste buds matter). I feel sick even thinking about the banana. May Cattelan’s next project involve a less tempestuous fruit.
