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Banksy Artwork Self-Destructs At Auction Right After Being Sold For $1.3 Million (cbsnews.com)
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: Elusive street artist Banksy's famous "Girl With Balloon" artwork was on sale at a Sotheby's auction in New York inside what looked like a normal, if slightly old fashioned painting frame. As soon as the auction concluded — the artwork was sold to a bidder for a cool $1.3 Million — a whirring noise started coming from the artwork hanging on the wall, and "Girl With Ballon" started moving down inside its frame, coming out the bottom of the frame in shredded strips. In what must be an art world first, the artwork suddenly self-shredded in front of hundreds of stunned auction attendants. It appears that — somehow — Banksy or some other prankster installed a battery powered paper shredding mechanism in the bottom of the artwork's frame that can be remotely triggered. In a tweet on his Twitter account, Banksy posted an image of the destructed artwork and wrote "Going, gone, gone...", potentially mocking the practice of auctioning famous artworks off for large sums of money. The question now is precisely what — if anything — the buyer of the artwork gets for his or her money, and whether "Girl With Balloon" is worth more or less than before now.
Which tells you everything you need to know about how specious and capricious the valuation model is for the art market.
Capricious yes, specious not entirely. Art is about things like communicating ideas and finding new ways to express them. I can't see much that is newer art than doubling the value of a work by shredding it in public. It says so much about the arbitrary way that people value things. There can have been no greater shock than having just bought a new work and watching it apparently disappear before you. Being so rich you can own and take away something that was originally given to the public by being put out as graffiti and yet not being able to own it because the artist (maybe? - he seems to have been at least tipped off) manages to control and change the presentation of his own work.
IMHO being able to arrange something like this shows that Banksy actually is worth the money.
Shitty stunt? I say performance art of the highest order.
Bravo!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So any claim that is is "destroyed" is factually false. At worst it is "damaged".
If this was actually the work of Bansky himself the artwork is now not so much "destroy" or "damaged" as it is "completed".
I think that the shredding added value because now the art ( which is well accepted and liked ) has added a value of a statement or act.
like a famous gun that killed someone, it's value increase due to the action it was involved in.
personally, I think it was brilliant. and just the opportunity to watch it happen will give me joy on how wonderful creativity can be.
if you see me, smile and say hello.