By last Wednesday, those questions of five years ago seemed quaint: bidding for Lot No. 10 – Alam’s banana affixed to a wall with a slash of silver tape – started at $US800,000. Within five minutes, seven bidders drove its price above $US5 million.
Loading
The artist was not compensated for the Sotheby’s sale, which was on behalf of a collector who has not been named, but he said in an email that he was nonetheless thrilled by the price it commanded.
“Honestly, I feel fantastic,” Cattelan wrote. “The auction has turned what began as a statement in Basel into an even more absurd global spectacle.” He added: “In that way, the work becomes self-reflexive: The higher the price, the more it reinforces its original concept.”
On social platform X, Sun crowed about his new art acquisition, and announced he now plans to eat it on Friday. He was honoured, he wrote, to be the banana’s “proud owner”: “I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history.”
Nowhere in that history is Alam. (Karina Sokolovsky, a spokesperson for Sotheby’s, confirmed that the banana was purchased from the cart where Alam works on the day of the sale. The vendor himself has no specific recollection of selling an extra-special fruit.)
A widower from Dhaka, Bangladesh, Alam was a civil servant before he moved to the United States in 2007 to be closer to one of his two children, a married daughter who lives on Long Island. Speaking in Bengali, he said his home is a basement apartment with five other men in Parkchester, in the Bronx, and he pays $US500 a month in rent for his room. His fruit stand shifts are 12 hours long, four days a week; for each hour on his feet, in all weather, the owner pays him $US12. His English is limited mostly to the prices and names of his wares – apples, three for $US2; small pears, $US1 each.
He has never stepped inside the auction house. He wouldn’t be able to see the art clearly anyway: His vision is deeply impaired, he said, because he needs cataract surgery, which he has scheduled for January.
To Alam, the joke of Comedian feels at his expense. As a blur of people rushed by his corner a few days after the sale, shock and distress washed over him as he considered who profited – and who did not.
“Those who bought it, what kind of people are they?” he asked. “Do they not know what a banana is?”
In his email, Cattelan said he was affected by Alam’s reaction to his artwork, but stopped short of joining in his criticism. “The reaction of the banana vendor moves me deeply, underscoring 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 politics.”
For Alam, not much has changed since his banana sold. At the fruit stand, it’s still four bananas for $US1, or 24.8 million bananas for $US6.2 million.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.