The art world can (always) surprise us. After the famous case of a banana stuck with tape, now the 'protagonist' is another: a cucumber slice from a McDonald's hamburger that an Australian artist sent up to the ceiling.

Australian artist Matthew Griffin is charging 6,100 euros (more than 400,000 meticais), for a work, which consists of a single piece of cucumber torn from a McDonald's hamburger and thrown onto the ceiling of the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand.

According to the gallery, the piece, entitled "Pickle," is a "provocative" gesture that questions what really has value.

It is one of four new works in "Fine Arts." For the amount charged, some connoisseurs consider it "genius" and "brilliant," while others call it "idiotic."

One critic pointed out the gulf between how the gesture is treated in a gallery compared to the restaurant, recalling that "he was kicked out of a McDonald's by the police for doing this when he was a teenager, now it's art."

The piece is reminiscent of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's artwork called "Comedian," a banana stuck to the wall of a gallery in Miami in 2019 that sold for €108,000 (7,049,918.82 meticais), and was then ripped off the wall and eaten by American artist David Datuna.

Part of the goal of the work is to generate different responses and reactions, according to Ryan Moore, the Director of Fine Arts, who represents Griffin.

"A humorous response to the work is not invalid, it's okay because it's funny," he said.

Moore appreciates Griffin's work because, in addition to using humor as a device, it follows contemporary art traditions and questions "how value and meaning is generated among people."

"In general, it is not the artists who decide whether something is art or not, it is they who make things. Whether something is valuable as a work of art is how we as a society choose to use it or talk about it," he stressed.

On Instagram, the Fine Arts Sydney shows a photograph of the artwork and explains that "'Pickle', 2022, by Matthew Griffin, is a sculpture that holds a pickle slice from a McDonald's 'cheeseburger', thrown against the ceiling."