Remember the $120,000 banana artwork? An art student just made it a snack

Who’s to say what qualifies art as art?

Pop-art icon Andy Warhol crafted a silkscreen banana print. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall. Seoul National University art student Noh Hyun-soo removed the latter banana and ate it.

Aesthetes and skeptics have been flocking to the Leeum Museum in the affluent Hannam neighborhood of Seoul, South Korea, since the “WE” exhibit opened in January.

There, onlookers can appreciate or attempt to make sense of Cattelan’s satirical and provocative pieces, including “Shadow,” in which a silicone sculpture of his late mother sits inside a refrigerator; “Frank and Jamie,” another silicone sculpture, but of two NYPD officers standing on their heads; and maybe the exhibit’s most buzz-worthy attraction, “Comedian,” which features a banana duct-taped to a wall.

But, in a video published last week by Korean broadcaster KBS, the young art student Noh rebels with a performance that demonstrates art begets art, or something like that.

The student is seen removing the banana from the wall as a voice calls out, “Hey, you there!” He quickly peels the banana and nonchalantly eats it while the camera rolls, before taping the peel back to the wall.

“I found it fun in that defacing a work of art could be seen as a work of art itself,” Noh told KBS, adding that he told the museum he ate the banana because he was hungry.

The “Comedian” piece had sold in the past for $120,000, but it would seem it is the concept that is art-worthy rather than the banana itself, as the fruit is swapped out every few days to maintain its ripe appearance.

“I don’t think I saw anyone else do something like this, so I just went ahead and did it for fun. Don’t they put [the banana] on the wall for eating, anyway?” Noh added to KBS.

But Noh wasn’t the first to eat the banana at the center of “Comedian.” In 2019, performance artist David Datuna ate one of the bananas at Art Basel Miami and videotaped what he called an “art performance.”

He titled the performance “Hungry Artist” in an Instagram post capturing the incident.

The act of destroying art (intentionally or not) and calling that destruction “art” has often made headlines, and maybe that’s the point.

Earlier this year, one of neo-pop artist Jeff Koons’ famous porcelain “Balloon Dog” sculptures shattered when a woman bumped into the podium displaying it at Miami’s contemporary art fair Art Wynwood.

The incident became the fair’s main event, and the broken shards became the hot new collectible for art connoisseurs hungry for a piece of history.

“I find value in it even when it’s broken,” art collector Stephen Gamson told the Miami Herald at the time. “To me, it’s the story. It makes the art even more interesting.”