A framed canvas version of Girl with Balloon by Bansky, the pseudonymous street artist whose true identity remains unknown despite the best efforts of researchers and journalists alike, just sold at London auction house Sothebys for at least $1.1 million. At pretty much the exact moment the work was sold, a hidden device in the work’s frame activated, apparently sucking a little over a third of the print through
A framed canvas version of Girl with Balloon by Bansky, the pseudonymous street artist whose true identity remains unknown despite the best efforts of researchers and journalists alike, just sold at London auction house Sothebys for at least $1.1 million. At pretty much the exact moment the work was sold, a hidden device in the work’s frame activated, apparently sucking a little over a third of the print through a shredder mounted in the bottom.
Video of the incident posted to Banksy’s Instagram account alongside the Picasso quote “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge” show that the frame of the painting does not appear to have any wires attached. TechCrunch noted that the art in question was listed as being given to the owner by Banksy in 2006, meaning that the internal components as well as a charged battery inside either lasted 12 years—seemingly unlikely—or the device was primed prior to the sale by someone working on behalf of the artist. In either case, it seems likely an individual in attendance hit a remote trigger as soon as the auction closed.
According to Bloomberg, this all certainly resulted in a typically Banksian reaction:
It is obviously entirely possible that the shredded piece is now worth more, given that it was the linchpin of a high-profile art prank. It’s also unclear whether the print was in fact shredded or whether a secondary print was rolled up inside, and the whole thing is a parlor trick.
This could be could be construed as commentary, a twist on Banksy’s well-publicized distaste for the rich people buying and selling his art at grotesque prices like he’s Jeff Koons or something. Or it could interpreted as rubbish, selling fundamentally lazy and internally inconsistent “gotchas” about cultural capitalism back to the ultra-wealthy architects of it as monuments to themselves. As the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker put it in 2006:
“Banksy is just basically hilarious to me,” Cullen Crawford, a comedy writer who ran the (now-defunct) Twitter account @LazyBanksy, told the Daily Dot in 2012. “He’s like if an overwrought editorial cartoon went to college at Urban Outfitters.”
As opposed to prior supposedly biting critiques Banksy has made of the art world like a print titled I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit, this one is at least a good punchline regardless of what one thinks of the underlying message.
As one Twitter user noted, another work that had a bit more to say about the concept of destruction was artist Chris Burden’s 1988 exhibition of Samson, which consisted of a 100-ton jack pressed against supporting walls at the Newport Harbor Art Museum and tied to a turnstile such that (in theory, if not in practice) if enough visitors attended the building would collapse. Fire officials later had the piece removed as a safety hazard.
[ TechCrunch]
