Oh, those crypto bros. (Let them eat bananas.)

Last month, at auction, Sotheby sold a work of conceptual art (entitled Comedian) by "artist" Maurizio Cattelan. The work was a banana, duct-taped to the wall with classic gray Duck Tape. The price? A cool $6.2M. (Actual winning bid: $5.2M, but what with fees, etc...)

Well, congratulations to Maurizio Cattelan on his big pay day. I'd say he's really putting the "con" in conceptual art, that's for sure.

The lucky auction winer was crypto bro Jusin Sun. And a week later, he ate the banana. Because you just don't let a $6.2M banana rot on the wall, do you?

“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun, who was born in China, said after getting his first taste. “It’s really quite good.”

Sun said he felt “disbelief” in the first 10 seconds after he won the bid, before realising “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... 

On Friday, Sun compared conceptual art such as Comedian to NFT (non-fungible token) art and decentralised 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 $30m investment in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency project backed by the US president-elect, Donald Trump. (Source: The Guardian)

Oh, why oh why oh why oh am I not surprised that the banana on the wall is but a mere one degree of separation from Donald Trump. Bet we'll be seeing a lot more of this over the next four years.

Oh and a further no surprise surprise:

Sun was last year charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission with offering and selling unregistered securities in relation to his crypto project Tron. The case is ongoing.

Could there be a pardon in Sun's future? 

Anyway, this bananaa concept has been around for a few years, having first appeared in 2019 at Art Basel's Miami outpost, where several versions of it sold in the $120K-150K range, before yet another conceptual artist ripped it off the wall and ate it. 

If the $6.2M price sounds more than a tad bit steep, it does include instructions on how to replace the banana when it starts to rot. Which seems a lot like the "recipe" for Pudding in a Cloud which was featured in a Cool Whip TV ad of yore. In case you're wondering, Pudding in a Cloud is a plop of pudding in a bowl full of Cool Whip.

But wait, there's more! Sun also has the rights to recreate the artwork by duct-taping any banana to a wall and calling it Comedian."

The ur source for the $6.2M billion banana was a fruit stand in Manhattan, where it was sold to the artist - for a buck - by 74-year-old fruit stall worker Shah Alam, who makes a cool $12 an hour. When informed of the auction price, Alam was downright flabbergasted. So flabbergasted, he didn't even try to monetize his moment in the conceptual art sun to snap a selfie of himself and turn it into an NFT or something.

Never fear, Justin Sun's coming to the rescue. He's promised to buy 100,000 bananas from Alam's stand and pass them out around the world as “a celebration of the beautiful connection between everyday life and art."

Not as if a purchase of this magnitude just might overwhelm Alam and his stand. It's the gesture, the artsy, concepty gesture that matters. 

But why not just give Alam $100K, make his day, and get a feel-good NY Post story out of it?

There is so very much wrong with this story, but let's start with the obvious: spending $6.2M on something as frivolous as this - when the auction wasn't to benefit a charity - is obscene.  Imagine how much good $6.2M would do if it went to Habitat for Humanity to build housing for the poor? Or to St. Jude's Hospital, which treats kiddos with cancer for free? Or to a fund that supports starving artists?

Crypto, NFT art, duct-taped bananas? We're teetering on the brink of the abyss of absurdity. Sure, rich people are entitled to do whatever they want to do with their money, even if that money is crypto. But there will come a moment of reckoning when normal people are going to wake up and, maybe, at least, start demanding that the hyper rich start paying a bit more in taxes so that some of their money is directed towards the common good. So that normal people can more readily afford healthcare, and housing, and a banana splilt or two. It's going to be tax the bastards or roll out the tumbrels, I'm afraid. 

Eating a $6.2M banana sure doesn't help the case of the uber-wealthy.