South Korean art student eats £96,000 banana duct taped to wall 'because he was hungry'

I'll be the first to say that I don't entirely 'get' all famous artwork, but does that mean I'd eat a piece of it? No. No it does not.

But apparently, that's where South Korean art student Noh Huyn-soo and I differ.

To be fair, Huyn-soo doesn't go around eating frames, canvasses and watercolours - at least not to my knowledge - but he did eat a renowned installation by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which features a banana taped to a wall.

KBS News

Considering what he's studying, you'd think Huyn-soo would be one of the people who would want to make sure that no harm comes to famous artwork.

Footage from the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul proves otherwise, however, as the student brazenly removed the banana from its duct-taped holder, peeled off the skin and started munching.

Sure, it might just be a banana, but its involvement in the artwork definitely hike up its price tag, with first and second editions of the work having sold for £96,000 ($120,000).

KBS News

And Huyn-soo made no effort to hide his behaviour from other museum-goers, and instead stood proudly in front of the camera while he finished his snack before sticking the banana peel back to the wall.

Needless to say, the museum got involved in the situation and asked Huyn-soo the question we'd all want to know: why did you eat a piece of famous artwork?

Well, the answer was simple. He was hungry.

The student had skipped breakfast, and later told broadcaster KBS that while at the museum he decided that 'damaging a work of modern art could also be [interpreted as] artwork'.

As for why he reattached the peel rather than getting rid of the evidence? He did it as 'a joke'.

"I thought it would be interesting … isn’t it taped there to be eaten?," he asked.

KBS News

Now, I'd imagine most artists would be pretty p*ssed off to hear that someone had taken a bite out of their work, but Cattalan, who is based in New York, was surprisingly nonchalant about the whole thing.

After being informed about the incident, he reportedly replied: “No problem.”

Cattalan's casual response may be explained by the fact that the banana stuck to the wall of the museum actually gets replaced every few days anyway, so it's not like Huyn-soo was eating one particularly famous banana.

And he's actually not the first one to make a snack out of the piece either, as performance artist David Datuna did the same thing during the work’s debut exhibit at Miami Art Basel in 2019.

So it's already been proven that the banana can be easily replaced, and Huyn-soo had his fun as well as one of his five-a-day. In this case, all's well that ends well, but I should stress that you definitely shouldn't try eating any artwork yourself, just in case it doesn't go down so well.