A couple of weeks ago, one of Banksy’s framed pieces, Girl With Balloon, was sold to an unknown collector at an auction in London for $1.4 million US dollars. As soon as it was sold, a beep sounded. The beep came from a shredder embedded in the frame of the artwork that destroyed half of the painting and ripped it into strips. This was later brought to light by Banksy, who posted on Instagram a clip of himself building the frame and planning this surprise. In explaining his motivation on video, he quoted Picasso: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
The art world was taken by surprise when Banksy, known for his politically subversive street art, decided to sell a piece at Sotheby’s. Sotheby’s, an elite auction house, epitomizes everything that Banksy seeks to critique through art. The whole purpose of the street art produced by Banksy is to give the voices of the undesired and unwanted a platform. Street art shows the cracks within our society and our capitalist system. It reveals these cracks to the masses in such a way that they experience discomfort. Seeing Banksy’s art, viewers must confront the very voices and experiences that they choose to ignore on a daily basis. When art created with such a purpose is appraised and sold off to the very people that the artwork is criticizing, what does that make of the art or the artist? What does it tell of our society that wants to value and quantify everything?
This question regarding the value of art has been lingering in my mind for a while. Why do collectors actually collect art? Because it actually has meaning for them and is able to convey a message? Or because having this piece will become profitable in the long-term?
We like to think that we are not obsessed with finances and value art because we usually define art as priceless. However, we should acknowledge that a whole sector within the art industry thrives off of quantifying and selling off art pieces. Some people collect art just to brag about how much money they spent on a specific piece. It should also be stated that artists are not completely innocent within this money-oriented environment, either. Some of them start off as street artists to gain recognition and enter the art industry, only to later sell off their art. One such example is Thierry Guetta, or Mr. Brainwash, who was overwhelmed with the attention that he was receiving from the art world and cashed off his attention in a short period of time. We can clearly see his transition from street to mainstream artist in the movie Exit Through The Gift Shop.
The role of art within our society was questioned even further when the collector who purchased the Banksy piece was not even sad about the destruction of his purchase. In fact, he stated that he was delighted by the outcome of his purchase. The reason for this reaction becomes apparent when art collectors estimated that the self-destruction of the Banksy work actually added value to the piece. According to the website MyArtBroker.com, which resells Banksy pieces, the piece is worth upwards of 7 million US dollars as a result of its destruction. As a result, the collector’s investment increased seconds after purchasing it.
All of these reactions, focused on recalculating the value of Banksy’s piece, show how the message and the emotions artworks mean to evoke do not matter to the masses. Banky’s Mona Lisa is well known in part because the original da Vinci Mona Lisa is one of the most talked-about pieces of art to ever exist. When one tries to express the value of something, one often gives the original Mona Lisa as an example. It is this act of redefining the original artwork, turning it into a symbol or a point of reference, that makes the new Banksy piece popular or a unquantifiable piece of art.
What makes a piece of art good? Or bad? Shouldn’t something that is supposed to evoke different emotions and different ideas in every person be subjective in its quality as well? What is good for somebody does not have to be good for everybody and vice versa. However, as seen by these set of events, many people in the mainstream artworld struggle evaluating pieces without quantifying their worth.
Banksy’s purpose with shredding Girl With Balloon is to show this contradictory nature of the art industry. Maybe his real work was not the stencil itself, but manufacturing such a reaction from the community. As the quote from Picasso states, maybe the destruction of his artwork actually created a new lens in which one could see the problems of the world we live in. The senior director of the auction joked about the whole situation by stating that Sotheby’s “…just got Banksy’ed”. It is funny that the person who states that he got Banksy’ed is not aware of Banksy’s critique. Maybe we just need to get Banksy-ed more to open our eyes. •
