Famous fruit stolen again from $6.2M artwork why the thief is getting away with it

It was ripe for the picking. Banana bandits scored a sweet steal worth a whopping $6.2 million, nabbing the yellow, crescent-shaped centerpiece of “Comedian,” a masterpiece by Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan, from the Centre Pompidou-Metz museum in France this weekend. The fruity theft comes just one year after a gallery visitor was discovered eating the banana that previously starred in the masterwork. It’s a feast for the eyes — and the sticky fingers. A guard for the Centre Pompidou-Metz noticed the banana, crudely affixed to the museum wall with a slice of silvery duct tape as a work of conceptual art, had disappeared Saturday. The museum alerted the police, filed a criminal lawsuit, and restored the installation — meaning they replaced the bauble with, you guessed it, another banana. Because unlike, say, $100,000 worth of jewels, it’s that easily replaced.“No irreversible damage has been noticed,” reps for Pompidou-Metz said in a statement, per the UK Times. The starchy snack has been swapped out several times since its December 2019 debut at Art Basel in Miami Beach, Florida, where it sold for a jaw-dropping $120,000.But Cattelan purchased the original banana for 35 cents from a 74-year-old fruit vendor in the Big Apple.  The appetizing pièce de résistance, however, has met an unfortunate end on several occasions, thanks to hungry art lovers, including Noh Huyn-soo, who couldn’t resist sinking his teeth into the treat when it was on display at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, in 2023. Justin Sun, a Chinese-born cryptocurrency mogul, too, chewed up the banana after purchasing Comedian for $6.2 million at an auction at Sotheby’s the following year. Cattelan replicated the mouth-watering masterwork for Centre-Pompidou Metz in May 2025, only for it to be gobbled up by a visitor on July 12. Its allure is so bananas that even The Post succumbed to its appeal, recreating the creation with an 80...