![]() In what can be called a quintessential Banksy moment, the moment the hammer slammed down selling Girl with Balloon for $1.4 million, the work of art started to lower itself through a shredder built into the bottom of the frame. In 2018, a 2006 framed copy of the artwork was sold at auction at Sotheby’s. Originally stenciled on an East-London wall, this now-iconic figure and has been reproduced in many different places, making it one of Banksy’s best-known artworks. Girl with Balloon depicts a girl reaching up towards a red, heart-shaped balloon. So, why would anybody need to collude? It’s an affair dictated by the implacable logic of an insatiable, amoral art market that knows no boundaries.Art or prank? The story of the half-shredded Banksy painting Regardless of his subversive intentions, Banksy couldn’t help but benefit from the furore. This seems highly unlikely because the ramping would have occurred as a kind of mechanism, even if the painting had been completely shredded. ![]() Needless to say, some believe Love is in the Bin is the fruit of a big conspiracy cooked up by Banksy, Sotheby’s and complicit buyers, to ramp up the market for the artist’s work. After all, business is business, isn’t it? On the other hand, perhaps they like to feel they are good people who support all these humanitarian causes, even if their commercial practices suggest the very opposite. It allows collectors to imagine themselves engaged in a dangerous, cutting-edge activity, being besieged on all sides. Gung-ho capitalists take a keen pleasure in possessing works that denounce capitalism, and are willing to pay millions for the privilege. The Victorians had a fetish for “ornamental poverty”, festooning their drawing rooms with pictures of poor urchins shivering on street corners, and today’s wealthy collectors enjoy the idea of “ornamental activism”. What Banksy has done is expose the decadence of collectors and museums that get a special thrill spending a fortune on works that challenge the very system which creates extreme personal wealth. The most famous auto-destructive artwork was Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960) a fantastic, elaborate machine that worried itself to bits in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, in front of an invited audience. Avowedly anti-capitalist and anti-market, the movement was intended to draw attention to the more dangerously destructive powers of politics. Metzger’s avant-garde idea was to create works of art that self-destructed, reversing the idea of art as a wedge against time. The Montmartre café, Le Chat Noir, did a roaring trade after it began insulting and ignoring customers who were titillated by the experience.Īnother source of pedigree is the Auto-destructive art movement, initiated by Gustav Metzger (1926-2017), whom I remember as a little old man one often saw at London gallery openings. ![]() ![]() ![]() Épater long enough and the bourgeoisie begin to like it. Manet did it with Olympia (1863), a picture of a modern girl in the pose of a classical nude Duchamp with Fountain (1917), a store-bought porcelain urinal signed “R.Mutt”. There is, in fact, a respectable art historical lineage for Banksy’s act, which is a classic attempt to épater les bourgeoise – to offend or disconcert the middle classes with a rule-breaking work of art. Banksy’s Girl with Balloon before it was shredded. ![]()
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