Banana: Art, Culture, and Pop Iconography
Andy Warhol's banana cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) is one of the most famous album covers in history. Maurizio Cattelan's 'Comedian' (a duct-taped banana) sold for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami 2019, then $6.2 million at Sotheby's in 2024.
The Fruit That Became an Icon
Few fruits have generated as much cultural weight as the 🍌 banana. It appears in some of the most recognizable works of fine art, shapes the vocabulary of physical comedy, anchors one of the internet’s most durable jokes, and somehow managed to sell for $6.2 million at auction while still being edible. The banana’s cultural career is as improbable as the fruit itself.
Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground (1967)
The banana on the debut album of The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of the most famous images in the history of recorded music. Designed by Andy Warhol, who served as the band’s manager and produced the album, the original 1967 pressing featured a sticker printed to look like a yellow banana peel. Warhol’s instruction, printed on the sleeve: “Peel slowly and see.” Beneath the yellow sticker was a flesh-colored banana — an unmistakably provocative image for 1967.
The cover’s minimalism was deliberate: nothing but the fruit against white. Warhol understood the banana as an object already loaded with symbolic charge — exotic, phallic, comedic, mundane, and universally recognizable. The album was initially banned by radio stations not for its cover but for songs like “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs.” Decades later, the Velvet Underground banana remains a landmark of pop art crossover.
Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019–2024)
In December 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan displayed Comedian — a fresh banana duct-taped to a white gallery wall. He sold three editions:
- Two artist’s proofs at $120,000 each
- One edition at $150,000
The banana was eaten by performance artist David Datuna on the gallery floor (“Hungry Artist”). Cattelan reportedly replaced the eaten banana with a new one; the artwork is sold with a certificate of authenticity and instructions, not a specific banana. The work provoked international debate about conceptual art, value, and meaning. In November 2024, one edition sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $6.24 million — a new record for Cattelan and a benchmark of conceptual art’s capacity to generate value from pure concept. 🍌
Key Banana Cultural Moments
| Year | Event | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| ~1860s | Banana peel gag enters American vaudeville | Establishes the foundational comedy object |
| 1967 | Warhol banana — The Velvet Underground & Nico | Most famous banana in art history |
| 1971 | Woody Allen’s Bananas (film) | Banana as political satire vehicle |
| 2009 | ”Banana for scale” meme originates on Reddit | Defines internet visual humor shorthand |
| 2010 | Despicable Me released; Minions debut | Banana becomes a defining pop culture obsession |
| 2013 | Minions spinoff — banana obsession codified | ”Banana” enters children’s lexicon globally |
| 2019 | Cattelan’s Comedian at Art Basel — $120,000 | Art market assigns record value to taped fruit |
| 2024 | Comedian sells at Sotheby’s for $6.24M | Conceptual banana becomes a market phenomenon |
The Slapstick Tradition
The banana peel as a comedy prop predates cinema. Recorded use in American vaudeville comedy dates to the 1860s and 1870s, when banana consumption in US cities was first expanding. The physical mechanics of the gag — the slip, the pratfall — were studied seriously in the 2010s. Researchers at Kiyoshi Mabuchi’s lab in Japan demonstrated that banana peels have a coefficient of friction of approximately 0.07 when fresh, comparable to ski wax on snow (see The Physics of Banana Slip Science for full analysis). The banana peel gag persists in animation, silent film, and physical comedy to this day.
The Minions Phenomenon
The Minions, introduced in Despicable Me (2010) and given their own spinoff franchise, have an unexplained but obsessive devotion to bananas. The Minions franchise has grossed over $4 billion globally and the banana-Minion association is among the most recognizable in children’s culture worldwide. The connection is deliberately unexplained in canonical lore — the banana is pure comic instinct.
”Banana for Scale” — The Internet’s Measuring Stick
Around 2009, Reddit users began posting images of objects next to bananas to communicate scale, riffing on the arbitrary but universally intuitive size reference that a medium banana provides. The meme became a recurring format across Reddit, Imgur, and eventually Instagram and Twitter. The “banana for scale” represents a genuine cultural acknowledgment of the banana as a universal unit of intuitive measurement — roughly 7 inches (18 cm) for a medium fruit — operating as folk metrology through humor.
🍌🍌🍌