An Upper East Side fruit vendor has unexpectedly found himself in the middle of one of the most bizarre art auction stories in years—and he’s not happy about it.
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Shah Alam, who works at a fruit stand outside Sotheby’s on the corner of East 72nd Street and York Avenue, found out recently that the banana at the center of a piece of ultra-modern absurdist art that sold for $5.2 million (plus more than $1 million in auction fees) was bought from his stand…for 35 cents.
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“I am a poor man,” Alam, a 74-year-old immigrant originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh, told the New York Times on Wednesday. “I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money.”
However, Alam’s sudden fame may actually wind up paying off a bit. Justin Sun, the billionaire founder of a cryptocurrency fund who bought the piece which featured the banana from Alam’s stand, took to social media to announce that he intends on buying 100,000 bananas from Alam’s fruit stand.
“To thank Mr. Shah Alam, I’ve decided to buy 100,000 bananas from his stand in New York’s Upper East Side,” Sun posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday afternoon. “These bananas will be distributed free worldwide through his stand.”
Sun is based in China and didn’t elaborate on how exactly he’d go about doing this.
The banana-focused art piece, one of three editions called the “The Comedian” by artist Maurizio Cattelan, is a purposeful mockery of the insanity that surrounds modern conceptions of art and the entire auction house economy. Every iteration involves duct taping a banana to a completely plain surface; the first such piece, which was shown at Art Basel Miami back in 2019, fetched $6.2 million, according to the New York Times.
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Alam has other people watching his back, too, it seems. An anonymous New Yorker created a GoFundMe campaign for Alam and promised to match up to $5,000 in donations.
“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 smartass for figuring out how to make $6 million from that joke?” the GoFundMe page says.
As of writing, the fund has raised over $17,000. The person running the page said in an update that he is planning on giving the money to Alam in as discrete a way as possible, as he is concerned about his privacy.
When East Side Feed went to the fruit stand on Saturday afternoon to try and get Alam’s thoughts on these developments, he unfortunately was nowhere to be found. Instead, a younger man who indicated that he did not speak English, was working at the stall.
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