I should have mentioned this in my notes on the latest issue of Funny Times, since I learned about it there.  Anyway, here’s the report from Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird:

Great Art!

Artist Michael Fernandes’ exhibit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June caused a commotion because it was merely a banana on a gallery’s window sill, and Fernandes had it priced at $2,500 (Cdn) (down from his original thought, $15,000). Actually, Fernandes changed bananas every day (eating the old one), placing progressively greener ones out to demonstrate the banana’s transitoriness. “We (humans) are also temporal, but we live as if we are not,” he wrote. Despite the steep price, two collectors placed holds on the “work,” requiring the gallery’s co-owner, Victoria Page, to get assurance from callers. “It’s a banana; you understand that it’s a banana?” [Globe and Mail (Toronto), 7-2-08]

The installation was the target of a crime when a “prankster” broke into the gallery and replaced the banana with an apple and a handwritten note.  Here‘s the gallery’s site devoted to the exhibition.  In 1992, Fernandes gave this interview and published it in a book of his.