I missed this pre-Great Stupid story in 2019, when it was a harbinger of stupid things to come, and so missed it again this year, when it was back in the news a few days ago. It wasn’t too long ago that Fred and Pennagain reliably alerted me to ethics stories around the web that I otherwise might have missed. A few of you do send me story ideas regularly, but something like this shouldn’t slip through the cracks.

“This” is this (Source of that movie quote?): Absurdist artist Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall at an art show in 2019 and called it “Comedian. He claimed that it was intended to force critics to consider how modern “art” is defined, but it just as easily have been a publicity stunt or a con. My wige considered Jackson Pollock paintings no more “art” than bananas taped to a wall. Performance artist David Datuna ripped the banana off the wall and ate it, so Cattalan just taped another banana to another wall. The New York Post recreated “Comedian” for just $5.75, but, see, because the Post isn’t an “artist,” that didn’t count.

Last week, Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun bought the artwork for $6.2 million at auction. Then, in front of cameras, he ate the banana and crowed about it on “X.” “Many friends have asked me about the taste of the banana,” Sun Xed, attaching a video of him eating “Comedian,” although he didn’t eat the duct tape. Or the wall. “To be honest, for a banana with such a back story, the taste is naturally different from an ordinary one. I could discern a hint of what Big Mike bananas from 100 years ago might have tasted like,” added Sun, who is the founder of the cryptocurrency platform “Tron.”

Oh—you should know that he didn’t literally purchase the original banana duct-taped to the wall, but rather a certification from the artist that he was authorized to tape a banana to his wall and call it an authentic Maurizio Cattelan “Comedian.”

Someone so casually indulging in conspicuous consumption—literally—was naturally considered callous and unethical, so social media exploded with indignation. (My position on this kind of controversy is always “It’s his money and he’ll eat a $6 million banana if he wants to,” but I must say that this stunt by Sun even tests my ethical patience.) What was Sun trying to communicate? It can’t be called performance art, can it, since he’s not a performance artist. Like sexual harassment, art is one of those things that depends on the subjective judgment of the recipient to define it. Was he making a “Let them eat bananas” statement, Marie Antoinette style, to the millions of people struggling to pay their modest grocery bills? Was he making a critical protest against the con that is art today? Perhaps his calculation was that eating the absurdly pricey artwork would get him invaluable publicity, making the $6 million cost a justifiable expense.

Responding to the negative reactions to his stunt, Sun announced a on X that he planned on purchasing 100,000 bananas — or $25,000 worth of the produce from the Manhattan stand where the fruit he ate was sold for 25 cents. But the New York Times reports that this gesture only emphasized the disparity between working stiffs and the super rich.

What’s going on here? Well, let’s see…

• By any analysis, Sun is an asshole.
• Rich people behaving like Sun and boasting about it has triggered social unrest before, in Russia, in France, and in the United States several times. It’s reckless, irresponsible and uncaring conduct.
• We all know art is a racket, especially public art, which Ethics Alarms highlights from time to time. Didn’t Andy Warhol make this clear decades ago? Still, if an “artist” knows there is someone out there who will pay millions for a banana taped to wall if his name is attached to it, it can’t be unethical to go ahead and tape a banana to a wall.
• Bernie Sanders, AOC, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich and other nascent U.S. communists out there love this story.
• Ann Althouse decided to mock the whole sequence of events by using this story to write a blog post about choosing not to do blog posts on certain subjects.