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Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby's
The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby's in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.
The work, "Girl With Balloon," a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby's "Frieze Week" evening contemporary art sale. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby's.
"Then we heard an alarm go off," Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. "Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame." The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby's staff members, had been shredded, or at least partially shredded, by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame.
[...] Perhaps the shredded "Girl With Balloon" might eventually also prove a lucrative investment. Banksy pronounced the painting "going, going, gone" on his Instagram account, quoting Picasso: "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." (The quote is often attributed to Picasso, but also to Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who died five years before Picasso was born.) But the painting was neatly shredded and could easily be backed on another canvas by a competent conservator. Thanks to the publicity of this stunt, could the painting now be even more desirable as a piece of auction history?
According to the artist, a shredder was secretly installed into the frame a few years ago in case the painting was ever put up for auction.
"Banksy is an anonymous England-based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film director."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @02:09PM
Despite your needless, self-righteous and smartass tone, I'm one of those people. I think that these "updates" and feature removals that you're talking about are just more attempts to take away property rights and control over our equipment and our data. I also think that this painting damage is probably at least a charge of vandalism unless the buyer knew what he was getting into when he bought it.
If this "artist" deliberately ruined someone else's property with no good reason (and "artistic whimsy" is hardly a reason unless the buyer knew full well something like this could be part of the package and consented to it before purchasing it), he should be made to answer for it. Frankly he sounds like he's got some sociopathic tendencies in him, artist or not.
I'm not even sure how you came up with the idea that people who are against feature removal and forced updates would be in favor of letting this stand. Where on Earth did you draw that conclusion?