Blockchain billionaire and artwork collector Justin Solar made world headlines in November after shelling out $6.2 million at Sotheby’s for Maurizio Cattelan’s Comic (2019), his notorious banana duct-taped to a wall. Solar then ate the banana at a buzzy press convention in Hong Kong.
Nevertheless, it appears Solar didn’t have a style for all of the press that come of it.
Based on Fortune, the blockchain billionaire and artwork collector pressured the crypto commerce publication CoinDesk to retract a December 2 article by Callan Quinn that was crucial of Solar’s press convention. The article was titled “I Watched Justin Solar Eat the World’s Most Costly Banana. I Don’t Get It.”
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“After Solar’s workforce complained in regards to the tone of the piece, CoinDesk’s house owners, the crypto change Bullish, demanded editorial employees take away it from the publication’s web site, in keeping with sources accustomed to the matter,” Fortune stories, including that former Wall Road Journal editor in chief Matt Murray left his place as chair of an editorial committee in December.
The report states that the choice to take away the piece from the location got here from Bullish, which acquired the publication from Digital Forex Group in 2023 for roughly $75 million. CoinDesk gained a George Polk Award for its reporting on crypto foreign money FTX change, which resulted within the firm’s chapter and the arrest of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
The CoinDesk report, which might be learn in an archived type, expressed skepticism over Solar’s publicity stunt. It delved into his troubles with the US Securities and Change Fee, which has charged him and Tron, the blockchain he based, with fraud, amongst different safety violations. Solar and Tron have moved to have the lawsuit dismissed. The report additionally said that Solar’s authorized workforce has a historical past of threatening media shops with authorized motion for reporting on the accusations leveled in opposition to Tron.
Quinn’s piece describes the media fervor round Solar’s banana-eating stunt, and by extension his acquisition of Comic, as “ridiculous” and the convention as a “advertising and marketing gimmick”. Of Solar’s acquisition of the paintings, Quinn famous that the response “amongst many observers was the standard one seen each time anybody spends a big sum of cash on trendy artwork: bewilderment, a little bit of disgust, an eye fixed roll.”
On the convention, Solar talked about Shah Alam, the seller who offered Cattalan the banana and was subsequently shocked to study of its million-dollar-sale from New York Instances reporters. Solar mentioned he needed to “thank” Alam by shopping for 100,000 bananas from his stand. Alam, nonetheless, doesn’t personal the stand.
The Hong Kong–primarily based entrepreneur returned to headlines shortly afterward when he invested some $30 million in Donald Trump’s crypto enterprise, World Liberty Monetary, which has proclaimed its intentions to “make finance nice once more.” Solar is at present its largest sole investor and an adviser to its board.
ARTnews has contacted Solar and Tron for remark.