A South Korean art student who ate a banana that formed part of a renowned installation by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan said he did so because he was “hungry”.
Noh Huyn-soo was filmed brazenly removing the banana, which was duct-taped on to a wall at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, unpeeling it and eating it in front of stunned onlookers before reattaching the banana skin to the wall using the same tape and walking off with a satisfied grin.
The incident was recorded by a friend of Noh, a student at Seoul National University, and lasted for over a minute.
When the museum asked Noh why he ate the banana, he replied that he was hungry after skipping breakfast, according to the Korea Herald. He later told the broadcaster KBS that he thought “damaging a work of modern art could also be [interpreted as] artwork” and that he came up with the idea to reattach the peel as “a joke”.
He added: “I thought it would be interesting … isn’t it taped there to be eaten?”
The banana, part of Cattelan’s Comedian installation, gets replaced every two or three days.
Cattelan, a sculptor and performance artist based in New York, was reportedly informed about the incident and simply replied: “No problem.”
It is not the first time a banana from the work has been scoffed. During the work’s debut exhibit at Miami Art Basel in 2019 a banana was removed and eaten by the performance artist David Datuna.
Datuna later told the Guardian that while he considered Cattelan to be “a genius”, he took issue with the huge amount of money made from a banana that cost 20 cents.
The first and second editions on display at Miami Art Basel both sold for $120,000 (£95,640), and another was put up for sale for $150,000 before Datuna showed up to eat the fruit. “I have travelled in 67 countries around the world in the last three years, and I see how people live,” Datuna said. “Millions are dying without food. Then he puts three bananas on the wall for half a million dollars?”
Cattelan, who was born in Padua, is also known for provocative artworks that challenge popular culture. One – an 18-carat gold toilet called America and valued at £1m – made headlines in September 2019 after it was ripped from its display wall during an overnight robbery at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
A middle-finger sculpture by Cattelan – known as Il Dito (the finger) but officially called L.O.V.E – opposite the stock exchange in Milan was vandalised by environmental activists in January.
• This article was amended on 2 May 2023. An earlier version said that the gold toilet called America was taken last September, instead of in September 2019.
