“Bananas! Art world gone mad,” blazed the cover of The New York Post on Friday.

Emmanuel Perrotin, the founder of the gallery that represents Mr. Cattelan (Galerie Perrotin), said the flurry over the artwork “was totally unexpected.”

Soon after his booth at the Miami art fair opened to V.I.P.’s on Wednesday, Mr. Perrotin said the gallery installed a GoPro camera in the booth to capture people’s reactions. “You have a work like the ‘Mona Lisa,’ where everybody is coming to look at it, to take photos with it, to discuss it,” he said.

But is this a groundbreaking work, an expensive inside joke or perhaps Exhibit A in a display of income inequality?

“Cattelan is the Anti-Warhol,” said the art critic Robert Storr. “Andy insisted that the Coke you and I buy was democratic in that it cost us the same as it did Nelson Rockefeller. But obviously Maurizio has grasped that the rich will pay much, much more for a bespoke banana — bruises and all. Let ‘them’ eat $120,000-a-slice banana bread.”