A banana taped to a wall with a strip of grey duct tape is worth, on paper, $6.2 million. That is not a metaphor. It is the appraised market value of Maurizio Cattelan's 2019 conceptual work "Comedian" — a piece that has, since its debut at Art Basel Miami, served as either the sharpest joke in contemporary art or its most embarrassing self-own, depending on your tolerance for institutional absurdity. On Sunday, Centre Pompidou-Metz, the satellite museum in eastern France where a certified edition of the work was on display, filed a criminal complaint after a visitor reportedly peeled the banana off the wall and ate it.

This is not the first time "Comedian" has attracted a hungry interloper. Since the work debuted, it has been eaten, defaced, and replaced with such regularity that the museum's curatorial staff essentially functions as a produce procurement team. The work comes with a certificate of authenticity — that certificate, and the conceptual idea it represents, is what carries the valuation, not the fruit itself. The banana, by design, is replaced every three days because it rots. The institution knows this. That is the point. Or at least, it was supposed to be.

What makes this particular incident notable is not the theft — it is the criminal complaint. Centre Pompidou-Metz confirmed it has reported the matter to French authorities, framing the removal of a perishable piece of fruit as a criminal act against a multimillion-euro artwork. The museum also confirmed it has already replaced the banana and reinstalled the piece. The art continues. The law, presumably, is considering its options.

The legal question here is genuinely strange and worth sitting with. French law, like most civil legal systems, recognizes property rights attached to an object. But "Comedian" explicitly decouples the object from the work — Cattelan himself has said the banana is not the art, the certificate is. When previous editions were eaten at Art Basel, the gallery shrugged and taped up a new one. So what exactly was stolen? A banana worth roughly 30 cents at a market stall, or a fraction of a $6.2 million conceptual asset? The answer almost certainly depends on which side of the velvet rope you're standing on.

Cattelan, the Italian artist behind the work, has built a career on exactly this kind of productive discomfort. His golden toilet, his pope struck by a meteorite, his Hitler kneeling in prayer — each piece is calibrated to make institutions perform their own contradictions in public. "Comedian" may be his most efficient trap yet. The moment a museum mounts it, they must guard a banana with security cameras and staff patrols. The moment someone eats it, they must decide whether to call the police. Every response the institution gives is the artwork completing itself.

The Pompidou-Metz, to be fair, is not an unsophisticated player. It is a serious institution, a regional extension of one of Europe's most important modern art museums, and it did not acquire a certified edition of this work by accident. Its staff understands the conceptual frame. But filing a criminal complaint — rather than, say, issuing a wry statement and moving on — suggests that at some altitude within the organization, the bureaucratic reflex took over from the artistic one. Someone weighed the optics of looking victimized against the optics of looking foolish, and chose the former. That choice, too, is now part of the work's history.

It is worth noting what the criminal complaint cannot accomplish. Even if French investigators identify the individual — and in a museum with surveillance infrastructure, that is not impossible — the charge would likely attach to destruction or theft of property. The banana, as property, is worth nothing. The prosecution would have to argue that the act damaged the certified artwork's integrity, which means putting a conceptual art theory in front of a magistrate. That is a courtroom nobody is rushing to convene.

Where this leaves the broader conversation about value, access, and institutional gatekeeping in contemporary art is a question the art world will continue to avoid answering directly. The piece sells for millions. It sits behind security. A tourist eats the fruit and the institution calls the police. Cattelan once said he wanted "Comedian" to make people smile. Whether that smile reaches the offices of the Metz public prosecutor remains to be seen.