Peel Slowly and Eat

A dollar sticker puts Warhol's face back on a banana, one year after somebody paid $6.2 million to eat the same joke on camera.

Andy Warhol designed the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico as a joke that needed real engineering. Early pressings shipped with a yellow banana sticker you were meant to peel off to reveal a pink one printed underneath — "Peel Slowly and See," it said above the fruit — and getting the mechanism to work reliably was fussy enough that it held up the record's 1967 release. The whole point was that some kid would buy a three-dollar album and actually peel it.

Fifty-two years later, Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a real banana to a gallery wall at Art Basel Miami and called it Comedian. Two editions sold for $120,000 each that week. A performance artist named David Datuna ate one off the wall a few days later; the gallery taped up a fresh banana and kept selling. A student ate the Leeum Museum's copy in 2023, then taped the peel back up himself. In November 2024 the crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun bought an edition at Sotheby's for $6.2 million, ate it live at a press conference in a Hong Kong hotel, called it "much better than other bananas," and told reporters the real value was the concept itself — then promised to buy 100,000 bananas from the Miami street vendor Cattelan got the original from. Someone ate the Pompidou-Metz's copy too, this past July.

Anyway. A few days ago the artist Eric Antonow — better known for the Methaphone, a slab of clear acrylic shaped like a phone, built to give your hands something to do besides hold one — mailed Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder an envelope with three stickers in it. Each one looks exactly like a produce label, except the oval has Warhol's own face in it instead of a Chiquita logo, over the word "Banana." It costs a dollar. You stick it on an actual banana and eat it. The card that comes with it spells the joke out on purpose, flipping Warhol's own line into "Peel Slowly and Eat," and names the project Re-materialism — art that "refuses to let irony have the final word."

Fifty-nine years after Warhol built that gag into a record anyone could afford, and ten months after someone paid $6.2 million to build it back out, that's a pretty good place to leave it.