Under the media spotlight, in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong, cryptocurrency collector and tycoon Justin Sun peeled and ate the conceptual artwork by Paduan artist Maurizio Cattelan , Comedian, the banana stuck to the wall with scotch tape purchased for 6.2 million dollars at a Sotheby's auction.
And he has pledged to buy another hundred thousand from the Bangladeshi street vendor whose stall on the Upper East Side sold the fruit at the center of the provocation.
Sun will pay 25 cents per banana “as an act of gratitude” to Shah Alam, the 74-year-old employee of a mini-chain of stalls that peddle fruit and vegetables to New Yorkers in transit on every corner of Manhattan. Alam earns $12 an hour (below the legal minimum wage in New York City) to work 12-hour days year-round at the stall near Sotheby’s on York Avenue.
The Bangladeshi burst into tears in shock when he learned that the banana paid 25 cents by an auction house official had been fought over by billionaire collectors for mind-blowing sums. "I'm a poor guy. I've never had, I've never seen this kind of money," the man told the New York Times. "Whoever bought it back, what kind of people are they? Don't they know what a banana is?"
Sun shared Amal's interview on X, announcing that she had decided to buy the huge amount of bananas from his stall "to say thank you."
A "generosity" that will bring very little to Amal, according to whom "procuring 100,000 bananas from a wholesale market in the Bronx would cost thousands of dollars" : the net profit from the sale of one hundred thousand bananas will be about six thousand dollars, and only a thousand will end up in Amal's pockets. The owner, Mohammad R. Islam, has already announced that he will divide the profits between himself and the other people in his employ.
(Online Union)