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A South Korean art student ate a banana, part of a famous $120,000 installation by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, the BBC reported. He stated that he did it because he was hungry.
But Huynh Soo was filmed brazenly removing the banana taped to the wall at Seoul's Leum Art Museum, peeling it off and eating it in front of stunned visitors, then reattaching the banana peel to the wall with the same tape and leaving happily a smile.
The incident was recorded by a friend of Noh's, a student at Seoul National University, and lasted more than a minute.
When the student was asked at the museum why he ate the banana, he replied that he was hungry because he had missed breakfast, the "Korea Herald" reports.
Noh later told the KBS television channel that he thought "damaging a work of modern art can also be interpreted as a work of art" and that the idea of reattaching the bark came to him as a "joke".
He added: "I thought it would be interesting... Isn't it stuck there to be eaten?"
The banana is part of Maurizio Cattelan's famous installation "The Comedian" a few years ago.
The museum management replaces it every two or three days so that it does not spoil.
When notified of the incident, Cattelan stated, "No problem."
This is not the first time a banana has been eaten.
In 2019, performance artist David Datuna pulled the fruit off the wall after the piece sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in Miami.
And then the banana was simply replaced and no other measures were taken.
Datuna later told the Guardian that although he considered Cattelan a "genius", he was troubled by the huge amount of money paid for a banana worth 20 cents, writes "Now".
The artist who ate a $120,000 banana: No regrets
The first and second editions of The Comedian, exhibited at Art Basel in Miami, sold for $120,000, and another was listed for sale for $150,000 before Datuna showed up and ate the fruit.
"In the last three years, I have traveled to 67 countries around the world and I see how people live," says the artist.
"Millions die without food. And then he puts three bananas on the wall for half a million dollars?"
Cattelan, who was born in Padua but lives and works in New York, is known for his provocative works.
One of them - an 18-carat gold toilet called 'America' and valued at £1million - hit the headlines last September after it was ripped from a display wall during a nighttime heist at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
A sculpture of Cattelan's middle finger, known as Il Dito (the finger) but officially called LOVE, erected in front of Milan's stock exchange, was derided by environmentalists in January this year.
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An art student in South Korea has taken the banana off the wall in an installation created by Maurizio Catellan and eaten it, because "he was hungry."
A new banana was placed on the artwork.https://t.co/7yv8SwVy2S pic.twitter.com/o3K5e1qCv4
— dbc (@dbc___) May 1, 2023
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