A DEVASTATED half-blind grocer wants his slice of an art fortune – after his 28p banana went onto become a £5m viral sensation.
Meet Shah Alam, a 74-year-old fruit seller earning just £9 an hour in New York. Despite his hard work, he expressed feeling like a “poor man” upon hearing about the million-pound purchase.
Earlier this month, Shah’s banana was bought and duct taped to a wall in an art gallery with an estimated price of £1.2million.
The piece, called “Comedian” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was labelled as a “profound” piece of experimental work.
It was bought by Cryptocurrency tycoon Justin Sun for £4.8million last Wednesday at Sotheby’s in New York.
This is a staggering price increase of 1,745,230,000 per cent compared to how much Salah’s banana originally cost, 28p.
Shah told The New York Times: “I am a poor man. “I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money.
“Those who bought it, what kind of people are they? Do they not know what a banana is?”
Shah Alam, a widower, struggles to make ends meet by paying £394 monthly to share a basement apartment with five other men in the Parkchester area of the Bronx.
He works at the same fruit stand on York Avenue and East 72nd Street for 12 hours a day, four days a week no matter the weather.
The new owner of the banana said in a press release: “This is not just an artwork.
“It represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.
“I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history.”
Who is Justin Sun?
THE Chinese-born crypto tycoon and billionaire is also the prime minister of a European micronation.
Justin Sun, 34, is the founder of TRON, a blockchain network and is known as a king in cryptocurrency.
Although he works in fruit sales, Shah Alam is also involved in overseeing TRON’s cryptocurrency USDD stablecoin, owning the BitTorrent protocol for file transfers, and managing the Poloniex exchange, a cryptocurrency platform.
From 2021 to 2023, Sun was Grenada’s Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organization.
In a blockchain election, Sun was declared as the Speaker of Congress and acting Prime Minister of the micronation of Liberland in Eastern Europe.
He is estimated to be worth at least $1.4 billion.
Sun has been at the centre of several controversies, having been the subject of a lawsuit filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that he and his companies took part in securities fraud.
It was claimed that the entrepreneur manipulated TRON prices while artificially inflating trade volumes to lure in investors.
In 2020, former TRON workers filed a civil lawsuit against Sun making claims “ranging from fraud to harassment to whistleblower retaliation.”
Reports humorously commented that Justin will have to construct the piece himself.
This will involve re-duct taping the banana to a wall.
He will also get a certificate of authenticity and instructions on how to install the piece himself.
But the billionaire did not buy the original banana and duct taped used, instead he paid the price to be able to replicate the concept.
At previous installations of the artwork, people have eaten the banana with one student from the Seoul National University in South Korea saying he did so because he was hungry.
REACTIONS TO SHAH’S STORY
In a post on X to his 3.6million followers, Justin announced a way to give back to Shah’s area.
He wrote: “To thank Mr. Shah Alam, I’ve decided to buy 100,000 bananas from his stand in New York‘s Upper East Side.
“These bananas will be distributed free worldwide through his stand.
“Mr. Alam’s contribution to this extraordinary artwork is indispensable, highlighting the boundless possibilities and value hidden in everyday life.
“I hope this initiative will bring his story to a broader audience and, one day, I look forward to visiting his fruit stand in person to express my gratitude again.”
The post has been viewed over 50,000 times.
Maurizio said: “The reaction of the banana vendor moves me deeply, underscoring how art can resonate in unexpected and profound ways.
“However, art, by its nature, does not solve problems — if it did, it would be politics.”
An anonymous New Yorker launched a GoFundMe for the fruit seller and promised to match the first $5,000 (£3,492) raised dollar-for-dollar.
The fundraiser commented: “Do we really want to live in a city where we can shrug off a street vendor who’s moved to tears by the fact that he’s been made the butt of a joke involving an amount of wealth obscene to him, while celebrating some smart**s for figuring out how to make $6 million from that joke?
“If this utter and gross indifference isn’t what ails us, what is?”
Reactions to the original piece were mixed, with some questioning if the piece is meant to be interpreted as parody.
Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, said that Maurizio is often thought of as a “trickster artist”.
She believes: “He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”
Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, said: “What Cattelan is really doing is turning a mirror to the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking thought about how we ascribe value to artworks, what we define as an artwork.
“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled.”
