The artist who ate that $120k banana has set up his own food-based art show

Remember Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 banana taped to a wall from 2019’s Art Basel Miami? To be honest, it’s unlikely that anyone’s forgotten, given that it caused a viral backlash, was promptly eaten by the performance artist David Datuna, and later defaced by an Epstein truther.

Now, though, Datuna is carrying on the legacy of The Banana, by letting gallery visitors experience eating food-based art off the wall for themselves.

The New York-based artist’s new “interactive food show” is called Hungry Artist (as was his infamous piece of performance art at Art Basel), and will be shown at New York’s Ca’ d’Oro gallery.

Datuna himself will accompany visitors as they walk around the gallery, encouraged to rip items commonly found in a New York bodega off the wall and consume them on the spot. (Question: do the food hygiene authorities know about this?) Certificates authenticating the work will also be sold for $450, with proceeds going to a cancer research charity, The Art Newspaper reports.

“What I started with the Hungry Artist in Miami is a new way of communication and a revolution of consciousness,” Datuna says in an Instagram post announcing the show. “What we perceive as materialism is nothing but social conditioning.”

“Any meaningful interaction with an object could turn it to art. I am a hungry artist, and I am hungry for new interactions.”

Interviewed by Dazed after he ate Cattelan’s banana, he also seemed to suggest that the act was a kind of communion with the artist, saying: “I didn’t eat this day because I wanted to keep just my art banana inside my stomach. So now my body is 10% Maurizio Cattelan.”

“I didn’t eat the banana, I ate the installation of Maurizio Cattelan and he is delicious.”

View the announcement for the show below.