SAN DIEGO, Sept. 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On September 3, sculptor and conceptual artist Maxfield Mellenbruch saw his work FOMO 01/12—initially distributed to collectors for $500—sell at Heritage Auctions for $10,980. The piece is a standard yellow Post-it note carrying a handwritten, numbered, and signed promise: “I.O.U. $1,000.”
The sale invites an inevitable comparison to Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—the duct-taped banana that sold at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million. But in a new essay, “A $6.2 Million Banana vs. a $500 Post-it — I Think Mine Wins,” Mellenbruch argues that his work may contain the stronger conceptual mechanism.
“Cattelan pointed a mirror at an existing absurdity,” Mellenbruch writes. “I engineered a machine to generate one. The $10,980 price tag wasn’t an accident of the market—it was data produced by the artwork’s own internal architecture.”
Engineering the System
While Cattelan relied on a gallery spectacle to expose how the art market assigns extraordinary value to an ordinary object, FOMO was built as a self-contained conceptual mechanism using two cents of office stationery, extreme scarcity, and a fixed $1,000 redemption promise.
The money behind the I.O.U.s wasn’t the point; it was one of the conditions of the work. The real material is the psychological pressure created when that fixed promise sits beside a floating market price, leaving every holder with an unresolved choice. When the auctioneer at Heritage invoked the title live from the podium, the system began generating its own behavior and consequences in real time.
About the Artist
Maxfield Mellenbruch is a San Diego-based sculptor and conceptual artist. In 2014, he launched Kialara as a platform for sculptural works that functioned as physical Bitcoin wallets, and is now expanding it into a broader creative house. Although FOMO 01/12 was catalogued by Heritage Auctions under the Kialara name, the concept, physical note, signature, and accompanying essay are entirely Mellenbruch’s own work, created independently of any commercial gallery system.
To read the full essay and explore the mechanics behind the piece, visit: “A $6.2 Million Banana vs. a $500 Post-it — I Think Mine Wins.”
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SOURCE Maxfield Mellenbruch
