At the fruit stand where he works on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Shah Alam sells dozens of bananas a day for 35 cents each, or four for a dollar. He makes a good deal on cheap fruit outside Sotheby’s auction house; Inside, works of art can sell for millions.
But last Wednesday (20), Alam sold a banana that, shortly after, would be auctioned as part of an absurdist work of art, in addition to more than US$1 million in auction house fees.
A few days after the sale, while Alam stood in the rain on York Avenue and East 72nd Street, separating bananas from their bunches, he learned from a reporter what had happened to the fruit: it had been glued to a wall as part of a work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and sold to Justin Sun, the Chinese founder of a cryptocurrency platform.
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And when they told him the selling price, he started crying.
“I am a poor man,” said Mr. Alam, 74, his voice breaking. “I never had that kind of money; I’ve never seen that kind of money.”
from fruit stand to work of art, began in 2019, when Cattelan first exhibited the work at Art Basel Miami Beach, the international art fair. The conceptual piece, made up of three editions, titled “Comedian”, is an implicit critique of the absurdity of the art world, in line with Cattelan’s provocative work. It came with a detailed manual on how to secure the banana with duct tape and permission to replace it when it rotted. (Cattelan bought the original bananas at a Miami supermarket, he has said in interviews.)
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Each edition sold in Miami for between $120,000 and $150,000, generating wild crowds: a performance artist at the exhibition ripped one off the wall, peeled the banana and ate it. Cattelan was enthralled by what exactly constitutes art and how it is valued.
Last Wednesday, those questions from five years ago seemed antiquated: Bidding for Lot No. 10 — Alam’s banana affixed to a wall with a strip of silver tape — started at $800,000. Within five minutes, seven bidders raised the price above $5 million.
The artist was not compensated for the sale at Sotheby’s, which was made on behalf of an unnamed collector, but he said in an email that he was very happy with the price achieved.
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“Honestly, I feel fantastic,” wrote Cattelan. “The auction turned what began as a statement in Basel into an even more absurd global spectacle.” He added: “In this way, the work becomes self-reflexive: the higher the price, the more it reinforces its original concept.”
On X, Sun boasted about his new artistic acquisition and announced that he now plans to eat it on Friday (29). He said he was honored to be the “proud owner” of the banana: “I believe this piece will inspire more reflection and discussion in the future and become part of history.”
Nowhere in this story is Alam. (Karina Sokolovsky, a spokeswoman for Sotheby’s, confirmed that the banana was purchased from the stand where Alam works on the day of the sale. The seller himself has no specific memory of selling such a special fruit.)
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A widower from Dhaka, Bangladesh, Alam was a civil servant before moving to the United States in 2007 to be closer to one of his two children, a married daughter who lives on Long Island. He said his home is a basement apartment with five other men in Parkchester, the Bronx. For his room, he pays $500 a month in rent, he said, speaking in Bengali. His shifts at the fruit stand are 12 hours, four days a week; for every hour of standing, in any weather, the owner pays $12. His English is mostly limited to the prices and names of his wares—apples, three for $2; small pears, $1 each.
He never entered the auction house. He wouldn’t be able to see the art clearly anyway: His vision is profoundly impaired, he said, because he needs cataract surgery, which is scheduled for January.
For Alam, the “Comedian” joke seems to be at his expense. As a crowd of people hurried past his corner a few days after the sale, shock and anguish washed over him as he considered who profited—and who didn’t.
“Those who bought it, what kind of people are they?” he asked. “Don’t they know what a banana is?”
In his email, Cattelan said he was moved by Alam’s reaction to his artwork, but did not join in his critique. “The banana seller’s reaction moves me deeply, underlining how art can resonate in unexpected and profound ways,” he wrote. “However, art, by its nature, does not solve problems — if it did, it would be political.”
For Alam, little has changed since his banana was sold. At the fruit stand, it’s still four bananas for a dollar, or 24.8 million bananas for $6.2 million.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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