Two years after Maurizio Cattelan's duct-taped banana sold at Sotheby's for $6.2 million, the same sum now buys something rather different at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York: more than six million miniature artworks, dispensed one at a time from a vending machine for a single dollar.

The machine is the work of Inciardi Prints, the printmaking studio founded by Brooklyn artist Anastasia Inciardi. Each dollar buys a randomly selected miniature print, one of ten designs. Nine show New York icons — the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, a pigeon, a yellow cab and a hot dog among them — while the tenth depicts the banana, a playful nod to Cattelan's Comedian, first shown at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019.

Inciardi devised the miniature-print vending machine in 2020 as a way of gathering coins for the launderette, having grown tired of running out of quarters. The format caught on: more than 200 of the machines now operate, mostly across the United States, and the prints have gathered a devoted following, including a dedicated subreddit for collectors. Inciardi has described them as Pokemon cards for women, prizing the thrill of tracking them down in person rather than buying online. The Guggenheim machine is a one-off model built for the museum.

Each print begins as a linocut carved by hand, then reproduced by risograph, a process that leaves small variations in every copy, so no two are exactly alike. The museum machine also carries a gentle set of rules for collectors: leave some for others, and if a queue forms, consider the people behind you. The idea has a long pedigree. In the 1800s a London bookseller used a vending machine to sell seditious books, and in the early 1960s Yoko Ono created Sky Machine, which sold small cards bearing the word sky.