By Walt Hickey

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Banana

Comedian (2019) by Maurizio Cattelan, the artwork that consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall, smashed expectations last night at Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary auction in New York, selling for $5.2 million after a seven-minute bidding war, or $6.2 million with fees. There were seven bidders for the work, which, again, consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall, and will be delivered to the buyer in the form of a single roll of duct tape, one banana sourced from a fruit stand on York Avenue, and a certificate of authenticity with specific instructions as to how to display the work, which has gone through a number of bananas in its time. The winner of the sculpture was a Chinese crypto entrepreneur, who has said he will eat the banana. The work has been interpreted by some as a specific commentary on the absurdity of the art market, which, nailed it.

Carlie Porterfield, The Art Newspaper

Eternal September No More

The latest data shows that 57 percent of the global population is connected to the mobile internet, but more importantly that the rate of growth of new internet users is slowing. According to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence, 4.6 billion people are connected to the internet through a mobile device. From 2015 to 2021, about 200 million people per year were coming online, but over the past two years, that’s down to 160 million new internet users per year. Around the world, the easiest-to-get-online are already online. There are 350 million people (4 percent of the global population) who live in areas that are simply not covered by a mobile broadband network. Even the least covered area on earth, sub-Saharan Africa, has 87 percent of its population covered by mobile internet network.

Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom, Rest of World

Dining

It’s November, which means one thing: Restaurants in New York City have to demolish their cute bistros, their European-style sidewalk cafes, and their outdoor amenities so they can fork over the space to the truly important usage of having one or two cars parked there. The roadway setups can resume on April 1. Over the course of the Open Restaurants program, 13,000 permits were issued to restaurants over four years, with peak participation hitting 6,000 to 8,000 restaurants. According to the Department of Transportation, for the latest edition of the now permanent outdoor dining program, the agency received 3,655 license applications from 2,981 restaurants, of which 1,569 were for sidewalk-only setups, 738 took up part of the roadway that would otherwise just be used for one or two parked cars, and 674 were for both. Finally, the city is serving its key constituent: a guy from New Jersey who drives and also hates it here.

Ben Brachfeld, AMNY

Orange Juice

Tropicana is redesigning its bottles and also shrinking them a bit, replacing a 52-ounce carafe with a narrow 46-ounce bottle. Orange juice has had a bit of a rough time, with Americans steadily drinking less and less of it every year. Tropicana’s sales have declined 19 percent year over year, in no small part due to rising prices and poor harvests. In the 2008-09 year, Americans consumed 865,000 metric tons of orange juice, a figure which has since slipped to around 500,000 metric tons in the 2022-23 year, an average annual decline in consumption of 4 percent. The crisis is easily the second-worst thing to happen to the reputation of “OJ.”

Millie Giles, Sherwood News

Theater

A new survey asked Americans about potentially divisive behaviors in a movie theater, with some coming in as broadly acceptable (leaving to use the bathroom during a movie, applauding at the end of the film, leaving before the movie ends) and some overwhelming unacceptable (video chatting on their phone, leaving trash at one’s seat, putting their feet on the seat in front of them). Speaking at a whisper was considered acceptable by 71 percent of respondents and unacceptable from 19 percent, while talking at a regular volume was considered unacceptable by 81 percent and acceptable by 11 percent. (Indeed, a key conclusion from this survey is that about 6 percent of the population is simply monstrous.) Other behaviors that lots of people gave a pass were taking off shoes (24 percent acceptable), texting on phone (36 percent), and, most germane for Wicked this weekend, singing along to music in the movie (33 percent).

Taylor Orth, YouGov

MSNBC

Comcast is planning to spin off its cable networks, which would essentially eject an element of its business that has not been growing since the onset of cord-cutting. One network that might be especially pinched is MSNBC, which generally relies on the NBC News division to provide news gathering and guest appearances, and given that NBC News is remaining at Comcast, it’s going to have to do some pivoting. As a simple consequence of cord-cutting, MSNBC is projected to lose 10.5 percent of its subscribers from now until the end of 2025. Indeed, the entire MSNBC identity may be up for revision as it departs from the rest of the NBC family of products, and the name itself might stand to change. That might not be the worst: reminder that, not unlike The Learning Channel becoming TLC, or opera-oriented Bravo becoming Andy Cohen’s Bravo, MSNBC technically still stands for Microsoft NBC.

Brian Steinberg, Variety

Oil

Operators of ships are believed to be swapping sanctioned Iranian oil into China-bound vessels off the coast of Indonesia near the Malacca Strait. Based on a new analysis of five years of satellite imagery, something like 350 million barrels of oil changed hands in just one small rectangle in that area in the first nine months of this year, some $20 billion worth of oil. Ships that are positioned side by side are a clear sign of some kind of swap happening: In 2020, 5 percent of the ships (204 out of 3,898) parked in the area were positioned side by side, a figure that steadily rose to 10.3 percent as of 2024.

Serene Cheong, Clara Ferreira Marques, Weilun Soon, Krishna Karra and Yasufumi Saito, Bloomberg News

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