$1 → $1M · 5 tiers

Banana.

From the bruised supermarket banana to a single piece of fruit that sold for the price of a house.

Supermarket Cavendish

Material: Cavendish cultivar, ~120g, peel slightly bruised, picked green and gas-ripened in transit.
Function: Eat. Smoothie. Banana bread when it goes black.
History: Made with scrap but with soul — every banana you've ever eaten is a clone of one tree, propagated since the 1950s. Genetic monoculture; one fungus away from extinction.
What bumps the price: Organic certification (+$0.50), Fair Trade label (+$0.30), being yellow on the right day (+priceless).

Material: Rare red-skinned heritage banana, ~180g, hand-cultivated in Ecuador, shipped chilled in single-fruit packaging.
Function: Eat slowly. Photograph for Instagram. Tell people about it for three weeks.
History: Red bananas predate the Cavendish by centuries; they were the dominant variety until Panama disease wiped out the Gros Michel in the 1950s. Most people alive today have never tasted one.
What bumps the price: Cold-chain courier delivery (+$40), provenance card from the farm (+$15), six-pack subscription (+$300/month).

Material: Lost-wax cast bronze in a banana mould, hand-patinated to mimic a slightly bruised yellow peel, signed by a working sculptor on a hidden inner ring.
Function: Sits on a shelf. Confuses guests. Refuses to ripen.
History: The lost-wax casting technique is 6,000 years old; the same method made the Buddha statues in Cambodia. Applying it to a banana is the joke — and the joke is the point.
What bumps the price: Edition number under 20 (+$300), gallery provenance (+$200), a matching bronze pedestal (+$400).

Material: Stretched 100×80 cm canvas, multi-layer street-stencil banana, gold-leaf accent on the stem, signed certificate of authenticity from the gallery.
Function: Hangs above the sofa. Doubles in value if the artist gets arrested.
History: Street-art bananas blew up after the 2019 Maurizio Cattelan installation — but stencilled banana motifs go back to 1980s NYC graffiti. Anonymous artists started using bananas as code for 'consumer culture is fragile'.
What bumps the price: Documented street provenance (+$2,000), original wall fragment included (+$5,000), inclusion in a published artist monograph (+$3,000).

Material: One real Cavendish banana, one strip of grey duct tape, one wall-mounted certificate of authenticity. Buyer must replace the banana every 7-10 days from a regular supermarket.
Function: Conceptual art piece. The work is the certificate; the banana is interchangeable. You eat it eventually, then re-tape a new one.
History: Maurizio Cattelan's 'Comedian' first sold for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami in 2019. A 2024 edition sold at Sotheby's for $6.2 million. The buyer ate the banana on stage, then replaced it from the same supermarket.
What bumps the price: Original 2019 Art Basel certificate (+$4M), photograph signed by the original buyer eating it (+$200K), Sotheby's auction provenance (+$1M).