As the Trump catastrophe—noxious! inhumane! global!—continues to soil and degrade everything it can, from the National Mall to the Middle East to Madison Square Garden, we remain steadfast, scanning the planet for strange, surprising, generally less appalling stories. Happily, they still exist. For instance:
In Metz …
Eat your art out
Conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—you might remember: a banana duct-taped to a wall—has been stolen from the Pompidou-Metz museum in eastern France. Just last year, a visitor to the museum ate the banana, though “guards quickly intervened and stuck up a replacement,” said Le Monde. (The piece, which was first exhibited—and, as it happens, eaten—at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, has always required not one but a series of bananas, much like the many dog actors who played Lassie, though the dogs, we assume, were not eaten.) More notably, in 2024, the crypto billionaire Justin Sun spent $6.2 million on a version of Comedian, called a press conference, and peeled and ate it. The Pompidou-Metz has “lodged a criminal complaint for theft against persons unknown,” the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, a banana understudy has been taped to the wall. We wish it well.
