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As millions of people now know, Banksy's "Girl with Balloon", a 2006 aerosol on canvas, self-destroyed moments after the hammer falls The auction took place on Friday, October 5 in London as part of Frieze Week, where collectors from around the world visit central London.
"Girl With Balloon" had just sold for $ 1.4 million when an alarm sounded in the auction room. The canvas then began to slide inward of its frame and emerged in strips after being shredded by a remote control mechanism on the back of the frame.
Congratulations to Banksy. What a brilliant way to return the bird to the wealthy collectors, BS of the art world and the media in amazement: Put one of your own works at auction; watch the auctions match an auction record for your work; then, when the hammer falls, have it self-destruct.
Banksy was surpassed. But for what purpose?
"The urge to destroy is also a creative impulse," he wrote, citing Picasso, in an Instagram post after the event. Picasso was right: creation and destruction are closely linked. And some things, let's face it, must be defeated.
Destruction has long been a business card of avant-garde art. With Cubism, Picasso and Georges Braque destroyed the idea of conventional resemblances. The artists of the dada and surrealist movements, marked by the irrationality of the First World War, tried to destroy the reason itself. And in 1931, Joan Miro declared: "I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting".
When he taught Miro that he had always painted, despite the rhetoric, he replied, "What can I say? I can only be one painter. Every challenge of painting is a paradox – from the moment this challenge is expressed in the work ".
It's easy to imagine Banksy, who is doing very well in the art market these days, expressing a similar feeling.
Closer to home, Banksy's compatriot Michael Landy shocked the British public when in 2001 he collected all of his 7,227 assets – including his car (a Saab), his toothbrush, his passport and his birth certificate, and even works of art. – Disassemble larger items, catalog them, put them on trays on a treadmill and put them in a machine that crushes, shreds and sprays them. All this was played in public, in a storefront of central London.
In many ways, Banksy's joke looks like a lighter version of Landy's work, called "Break Down," and has seen the artist destroy works of his friends Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin (two megastars from the world of l & # 39; s).
Why light? Only because, although both gestures play in a show economy, Landy revealed an authentic commitment: when "Break Down" was over, Landy literally had no more good.
Banksy, we can assume, is doing very well. His criticism of the trade in the art world – which deserves all the criticism he receives – did him no harm.
Banksy is a genius provocateur. But his gestures and his gags have a kind of integrated futility, perhaps analogous to his painting with the integrated shredder: they are only designed to shake languages. They will not change anything.
In fact, it has already been suggested that Banksy's "Girl With Balloon" will have more value in the shredded state than before. If that was the case, it would be a direct result of the artist's genius in advertising.
What is the real problem here? Is it a system that values art in monetary terms so that it is traded on the market? Or is it a system tied to the motto of advertising and personal promotion?
If that is the last case, Banksy is deeply involved.
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This article was written by Sebastian Smee, art critic at the Washington Post.
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