If we were to hazard a guess as to what kind of person Banksy is based solely on his instantly-recognisable street art and various art projects, we can probably deduce that he’s the type who cares about social and political issues, and has a dark yet clever sense of humour. After all, he did come up with Dismaland.
But based on his latest and greatest masterpiece, we can add a new description for Banksy: Troll.
The anonymous street artist’s famous 2006 work “Girl with a Balloon” was auctioned off last week at Sotheby’s for over $1 million. After it was sold, alarm bells started ringing from the piece and the painting started sliding down into a shredder built into the picture frame, tearing it into little strips.
The creator of this shredder picture frame? Banksy.
Banksy may be smug, cheesy, and trite most of the time, and not everyone sees eye to eye with his works, but there’s no denying that he produced an absolute masterpiece with this little shredder stunt.
Since this is “art”, we can interpret this little incident in so many ways. Is it a display of Banksy’s own negative feelings to the mainstream art market? Is he just sticking it to the man? Or perhaps “Girl with a Balloon” was actually incomplete this whole time and shredding it was the final step of its completion.
Whatever the reasons why Banksy did it, those in attendance were completely taken back, unsurprisingly. Sotheby’s European director of contemporary art Alex Branczik told the Art Newspaper that not only did everyone get “Banksy-ed”, no one was “in on the ruse”, which makes the whole thing even more epic.
As for what happens now since the painting is more shredded than Chris Hemsworth in Thor, Sotheby’s released a statement saying that it is in discussion with the buyer about “next steps”. Presumably this could mean anything from sticky taping the whole thing back together to painting a replica and passing it off as the original.
I prefer to look at it this way: Instead of one big Banksy painting, you now have a heap of smaller Banksy paintings and that makes the whole thing even more valuable. Profit and capitalism for the win!
If all future art auctions feature a “self-destructing art” element to it like what Banksy just pulled off, these events have suddenly become way more interesting to non-arty folk such as myself.