That $6.2M Banana? Someone Just Ate It. Again.

Well, when you duct-tape a perishable fruit to a wall, call it art, and sell it for $6.2 million, there is just bound to be a hungry museum-goer around. When last we checked in on the previous iteration of the banana known as The Comedian by Italian artist and general rapscallion Maurizio Cattelan, it had sold for the above-mentioned rather-more-substantial-than-35-cents sum to crypto investor Justin Sun, and was promptly consumed by him. As ArtNet reports, it's happened again, this time when a visitor at the Pompidou museum in Metz, eastern France, swiped the banana from the wall and put it down the hatch on July 12.

No one seemed too perturbed by the seeming loss of a multimillion-dollar piece of art, notes CNN. Maybe because this actually is the fourth time somebody has eaten one of Cattelan's bananas. "The security team acted quickly and calmly, according to internal procedures," said the gallery in a statement. "The artwork was reinstalled a few minutes later," it said, calling the banana the only "perishable element." For his part, Cattelan said the banana-swiper missed the real deal: the peel and the tape, having "confused the fruit for the work of art."