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.

Comments

Re:I can't believe Sothebys' Was Surprised

[Zocalo]

I dunno, some frames are pretty heavy, especially the wooden ones, so it wouldn't be too difficult to put the shredder in the bottom and some batteries in the top and sides to balance it all up. Having the frame cover the guides wouldn't be too unusual either; it's quite common for the outer edge of a canvas or print to be behind the frame - usually it's wrapped all the way around and fixed on the rear. There are any number of release mechanisms that don't suck much juice either; you just need to think beyond the couple of days of your typical smartphone with all feature enabled - a modified camera remote could work very well for instance.

That said, I'm pretty sure that Sotheby's was aware to at least expect *something* out of the ordinary, if not exactly what was going to happen. Note also it appears to have stopped shredding with the image partially intact and still in the frame in a manner that still allows for display, probably by design so that the buyer is going to be upset either. Quite the opposite in fact; they now have an extremely famous piece of art that is now an extremely famous piece of performance art as well - instant appreciation in value, for those that are into that kind of thing.

Great art is that which evokes emotion

[SethJohnson]

I support your assertion and say the shredding is 100% part of the installation.

The original image is that of a child losing a balloon to the wind. Any parent who considers it feels a sinking in their stomach knowing how upsetting this is for the child. Great art is that which can make you experience an emotion. At the moment the shredding began, the buyer was immediately inserted into the body of that little girl losing the balloon. The buyer thought they were going to acquire a prized Banksy art piece and suddenly it was stolen from their hands by the wind, just like that balloon.

That's just one level of how this piece works. Secondarily, it sparks the exact debate filling posts here on Slashdot- is this valuable art to begin with if the value is increased by 'damaging' it? Banksy has been teasing the art world with this critique for over a decade and this piece is perhaps the epitome of that argument.

Finally, Banksy is a financial genius building demand for her work with stunts like this. Banksy has artificially controlled availability of her work to preserve the demand and high prices. Here, it seemed as though one of Banksy's iconic paintings was going to be available for a simple exchange of cash -- but not as easy as it would appear! The work committed suicide to escape the collector! And so the hunt continues.....