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It was like a movie scene.
"Girl with ball", ladies and gentlemen, standing in the back of the room, announced the auctioneer, Oliver Barker, with cumbersome bravado.
He was referring to the last batch of a Sotheby's London auction on Friday, October 5th. The piece: a work made in 2006 with an anonymous gun on the canvas by the anonymous street artist Banksy.
When he hit the auction hall, Barker began shouting six-figure prizes that bidders swallowed, pushing the value of the board into a frantic crescendo. Women in dresses and pearls shook hands on landlines to answer anonymous requests. Men in suits have noted important messages in even larger notebooks.
"Sold!" Barke peeps, patting her hammer against the podium. The coin cost $ 1.4 million, three times more than the estimated price, which ties the current record for a Banksy artwork.
However, at that moment, the awkward frame of the room burst into an alarming and persistent beep. The canvas went down the frame and emerged on the other side in tatters. The shredding process froze at about halfway through, leaving the upper part of the painting intact. The bottom, however, seemed macerated in tiny ribbons.
The guards rushed to remove the sorted paint as confused passers-by tended their iPhone camera in disbelief. A man with glasses, harried hair, wiped his forehead as he had just seen a ghost, while another was contemplating the show with childlike joy.
"Ladies and gentlemen, let's move on, if I could get your attention!" Shouted the auctioneer. Easier to say than to do, Oliver. It's not every day that an artist asks his works to self-destruct to cost him a million dollars.
"It seems we had just received Banksy-ed," said Alex Branczik, senior director and head of the contemporary arts section in Europe and London, at a press conference.
For those of us who do not attend the multi-million dollar art auction, the waterfall offered a delightfully unexpected image, that of beefy collectors and buttoned sellers stunned by the unmistakable sound of art shredding money.
The breathless praise quickly poured in and critics effectively turned the shredding incident from a simple act of trolling to a historic event of art.
"Banksy has joked the insidious world of bidding and disrupted capital flows – if only for one night," said New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz tweeted. "I'm not a fan of Banksy but it made us want to dance barefoot with him."
Saltz explained his reaction in an interview with NPR. "The market is a kind of silly organization," he said. "People in the market buy what others buy. And suddenly, one of the things that they buy has changed.
For Saltz, Banksy's gesture was an artistic major for the grotesque and useless excesses of the art market. And he was not alone. "Banksy's Sotheby's shredded works were a reproach of the empty consumerism of a master," suggested a Vox exploder, adding "there is one thing you'll never call Banksy – and that's all." is a massive sale ".
But to what extent is Banksy's scheme an "empty consumer rebellion"? Especially after the art dealer Joey Syer valued that the half-shredded piece could now be worth twice its original price, "up to 2 million pounds ($ 2.6 million)."
In an email to HuffPost, street art experts Steven Harrington and Jaime Rojo, head of the popular Brooklyn Street Art blog, said they felt the estimate could be conservative. "The original piece does not exist anymore," they explained. "A new version, transformed from the old, is accompanied by a well-documented story including performances, a stunned audience, a global discussion on social media. It is difficult to say how far it will go. Double [the price] maybe just the beginning. "
As a filmmaker Kaveh Abbassian tweeted, "Is this capitalism in its most misleading form, selling itself as anti-capitalism?"
The problem is that Banksy takes the opportunity to rebel against the artistic establishment monied. According to the New York Times, Sotheby's did not disclose the identity of the seller of the painting, who acquired it "directly to the artist by the current owner in 2006" according to the Sotheby's catalog. Yet, even if he did not see anything of the $ 1.4 million, he ensured that future estimates of his work by auction would take into account the potential for antics and the surge in prices that accompany them.
Banksy has long been both artist and troll, revolutionary and hypocritical. The art facility tolerates his attempts at subversion because he never completely bites the hand that feeds him. Instead, he prefers a slight slap on the wrist and then a kiss. ("Girl with Balloon" handed the headlines of the aging Sotheby's auction for a minute, did not it?)
This last joke reminded me of Sacha Baron Cohen's "This is America" series, in which the star deceives unsuspecting individuals to show how broken America is. Like Cohen, Banksy's power and privileges limit his ability to significantly dismantle the system he so clearly enjoys. Was the gesture really anything other than a mere wink at its own superpowers? At this point, is Banksy too big, too rich, too famous to bang on the market that made it?
"Banksy is as capitalist as anyone," Harrington and Rojo added in their e-mail. "Affirmations otherwise are dreary in denial."
Still in denial: maybe Sotheby's himself.
The auction house claimed to be innocent of the surprise grand finale of the evening; Branczik claimed that he was "not in the trap" at a press conference. But several factors suggest that Sotheby's was in the joke. First, the piece was sold last, even thinking it was not the most expensive book for sale that night. Second, as Andrew Bloch Highlighted on Twitter, a piece of this size would normally be displayed on a catwalk during the sale, not hanging on the wall. And are we supposed to believe that auction specialists inspecting the room before the sale would not have noticed a shredder built into the picture frame?
Sotheby's did not respond to HuffPost's request as to whether the company was already aware of Banksy's performance or whether the buyer had expressed dissatisfaction with the grated result.
In addition, Banksy's stratagem has attracted the attention of another historic turning point in art, the record for the current auction price of a work by a living artist. Jenny Saville's "Propped" prize in 1992 was sold at 9.5 million pounds ($ 12.4 million), marking a milestone for women artists struggling to get their work sold to a price comparable to that of their male colleagues, but you probably have not heard of it.
Samir Hussein via Getty Images A spectator watching Jenny Saville's "Propped" at the press conference devoted to the contemporary art exhibition of Sotheby's Freize Week.
It is true that Banksy's joke was a source of mischief in an environment renowned for its crust, lighting a candle in a moldy room. At the very least, it made people laugh, which, given the news cycle last week, was an act of charity.
Some will call the advertising stunt event or cute hoax, others turning decisive in the history of art, to the image of the "fountain" of Duchamp. The blurred border between the two evokes the muddy historic moment of art history, where hype prevails over the opinion of experts and academics . It is more difficult than ever to decipher a simple revolutionary provocation of a revolutionary artistic innovation.
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