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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.
https://youtu.be/ShcX_Zvn9WU
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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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.....
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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.
For this to have worked, the frame must be quite heavy to allow the shredder mechanism to be hidden within a hollowed out area and not be noticed by being heavier at one end. Along with that, the canvas must have seemed to be mounted in an atypical fashion so that the feed and guides were invisible. Finally, I presume that the shredder was controlled by something like a cell phone - I presume there would be a big honking battery in there because I would have to think would be days/weeks between receiving the art, having it on display and then starting the auction.
I disagree.
First hardwood frames are REALLY heavy, like surprisingly so. The shredder mechanism isn't going to be an office-type shredder which can handle 6 sheets at once and has a service life of thousands of sheets. It had to shred half a thing once ever. So, it could be of a much lighter construction; it's not like banksy had to worry about it getting blunted through use.
For the power source, a stack of primary lithium AAs would be more than adequate. And they have a very long shelf life (95% after 20 years).
http://data.energizer.com/pdfs... (page 14)
Triggering is an interesting one. Banksy was clearly there or sent someone there since he's subsequently posted a video of the shredding. So, the triggering could have been local either by RF or infra-red. That leads to a lot of interesting options. Sensors based on those are much, much lower power than a cell phone. And you could do something like wake up for a second every hour to listen for a signal, then either deep sleep or stay alert depending.
It would take some decent EE nouse to design that to last for a long time, but then again a smoke alarm can last a decade off a lithium PP3, and this thing could have had a lot more battery power in it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.