Someone has eaten Comedian — again. Comedian is the name of the infamous banana duct taped to a wall art installation by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. This time, the incident occurred on July 12. The banana was eaten at the Centre-Pompidou Metz in France.According to the museum, the security team calmly intervened, and the artwork was restored within minutes, presumably after a short trip to the employee break room. It is a real banana, after all. It needs to be replaced periodically as the old bananas age out of their time in the spotlight.Maybe there is some deeper art in its impermanence? Maybe something about the constant rotation of people in the spotlight, who are all, basically, different versions of the same thing? I don’t know, man. I’m spinning my wheels here. The whole thing is becoming a public domain joke that anyone with the tiniest sliver of an attention-seeking urge can participate in, and museums keep paying an artist to make the same joke over and over again.Cattelan never meant for the banana to be eaten. Or rather, not just the banana. The artist reportedly expressed disappointment that the person who ate the banana didn’t consume the whole thing, skin, duct tape, and all—missing the point entirely.But that is, of course, the point of it all, to act as a visual monument to the “absurdity of financial speculation and the fragility of knowledge systems that underpin the art market.” That’s the official line. To put it another way, the artist is blatantly making fun of anybody willing to spend an enormous amount of money on the stupid thing. A parody of the art market, a satire of the financial frenzy drummed up by something that took minutes to throw together, all over something as ephemeral as a banana.For the fourth time, someone has eaten the banana. The eating frenzy began in 2019 at Art Basel Miami, when performance artist David Datuna peeled and ate the banana in front of a stunned crowd, after the piece had just sold for $120,000. In 2023, an art student in Seoul went to town on it. Crypto mogul Justin Sun bought the piece in 2024 for a whopping $6.24 million and then ate it himself. Wonderful use of money.At this rate, it isn’t so much becoming a commentary on the wild over-evaluations in the art market as much as it’s posing perhaps the most important question of our time: should art museums be offering free snacks to visitors?The post People Keep Eating That $6 Million Banana Duct Taped to a Wall appeared first on VICE.