Art Basel Miami highlights the best new work from the world’s contemporary artists, many of whom toil away at their craft, painstakingly, hoping to create something new and innovative under the sun. But naturally all anyone can talk about is the guy who taped a $120,000 banana to the wall and the other guy who ate it.

The initial piece, Comedian by the Italian-born artist Maurizio Cattelan, and the subsequent performance/action, Hungry Artist by Georgian-born David Datuna, may seem too ludicrous to even parody, but all parties are making a good show of taking the matter seriously. In its pre-masticated form, Cattelan claimed that he worked on Comedian for a year, before deciding on exactly how to let the banana manifest itself. (In earlier conceptions, it was made of resin, before the sculptor realized “the banana is supposed to be a banana”.) Gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin explained that the angle of the tape and shape of the fruit were “carefully considered”.

While Cattelan certainly has an impish sense of humor, he isn’t someone who barged on to the scene with a bag of groceries. He has had a long career pushing boundaries that include golden toilets (yes, the one recently stolen from Blenheim Palace was his), taxidermy, waxworks of John F Kennedy, the pope and Hitler, and large sculptures of extended middle fingers. When the banana was taped to the wall, it quickly sold for $120,000, followed by another. A third was up for bid to a museum at $150,000 before David Datuna hit the Miami Beach convention center.

Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/AFP via Getty Images

Datuna is not just another prankster looking for a potassium fix. He proudly tells me via telephone that he is one of only two artists to have had shows at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery while still alive. His mixed-media sculptures often include eyeglasses as a motif, and in recent years he has done site-specific political work, such as laying out blocks of ice to spell Trump in New York’s Union Square, which would later melt. (This action was inspired by the withdrawal from the Paris agreement.) In 2022 in Qatar, timed for the World Cup, he is planning, as he calls it, the largest art installation incorporating artificial intelligence that has ever happened.

There was near pandemonium from selfie-takers around Comedian in Miami, and when Datuna saw it (and saw it was from Cattelan) he thought it was great. But when he Googled it and saw the asking price it took “about 15 or 20 minutes” to conceive of “the answer I must give to him and to the art world”.

“Warhol put banana on a canvas,” Datuna says with his Georgian accent. “Cattelan takes a real banana and puts it on the wall. David took banana from the wall and ate it!”

Datuna called his performance piece Hungry Artist and it quickly went viral. He did not have permission from Cattelan or the Perrotin Gallery.

Below is a further transcript of our phone conversation, edited for clarity.

Have you met Maurizio Cattelan?

No, but I follow him, he is a great artist.

Has he reached out to you since this past weekend?

No.

It’s plausible you will meet him some day on the contemporary art circuit, though. Would it be a warm meeting?

I would love to meet him. I think he is a genius. Art is about comedy, about fun, about tragedy, about emotions. He played this very well. I love the banana of Andy Warhol, but I think Cattelan has put the banana on a different level.

What I don’t like, however, is that a banana costs 20 cents. I think it is a good idea to put it in a museum if it is free to watch. But when you sell it for $120,000? Then decide to make a second and third edition, and that third edition is $150,000? It is silly, and not good for our contemporary life.

I have travelled in 67 countries around the world in the last three years, and I see how people live. Millions are dying without food. Then he puts three bananas on the wall for half a million dollars?

So you felt compelled to do something?

Cattelan beat Andy Warhol. Maybe I shouldn’t say beat, but brought it to another level. I began to think: “What can I do with this banana? How can I bring it to yet another level?” And how to do it also with comedy? So I ate the banana. It is something deeper.

Photograph: Rhona Wise/EPA

It’s like the story of Picasso and Modigliani, when they were having problems. Modigliani’s girlfriend gave Picasso some pieces and in the next week or two they had a group exhibition and what happened was Picasso painted his art on top of Modigliani’s art. He just left small pieces that you could recognize as Modigliani but it was Picasso. This is the same thing what happens now, but in a concept. Concept gets another concept.

Do you eat a lot of bananas?

About once a year. I do not really like them.

If you could tell Maurizio “next time, put this kind of fruit on the wall” what would you choose?

Next time Maurizio won’t put any fruit on a wall. Go on the internet now and you see everyone is doing this now. But I am no banana eater.

The gallery owner stressed that without an artist’s certificate, the banana just reverts to being a regular banana. Do you subscribe to this theory of artistic transubstantiation?

This has happened before, with Damien Hirst’s sharks that needed to be replaced. It is the idea that is important.

I hate to be vulgar, but it is a part of life: everything one eats eventually leaves the body. Did you feel a sense of artistic fulfillment when the banana left your body?

I felt, in my body, not part of the banana, but part of Maurizio.