The famous British street artist Banksy has always been very happy with the spoof art institutions. In October this year, he spread the spoofing tentacles to the auction, in which performing a piece of art and was stunned, in front of all the onlookers.
This incident derived from the last auction item at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction on October 5 this year, Banksy's "Girl with a Balloon" (2006). This artwork was embedded in the Victorian style frame commonly used by Banksy. The original intention of the artist to use such a large and cumbersome frame is to ridicule dull art institutions. When the raft fell at a price of $1.4 million, the audience was immersed in the joy of the second highest price of the auction record of Bansky. However, at the moment of the fall, the paintings in the frame were dropped halfway down, and the paintings dropped outside the frame were also destroyed by the in-built shredder. The onlookers shocked and delighted by the state of "self-destruction" of the work. In the next moment, everyone realised that they were "Banksy-ed". This piece was later renamed "Love is in the Bin", and the European female collector who bought the work is still willing to pay for the work at the price of the deal.
The recent article "Winners and Losers" published by the New York Times newspaper listed and selected winners and losers in all the art happened in 2018. Among them, Banksy's spoof auction incident was included in the ranks of losers.
“The British street artist Banksy put up a work at Sotheby’s auction house that half-destructed as the gavel came down, thanks to a remote-control shredder built into its frame. (It sold for $1.4 million.) The audience seemed genuinely shocked; those behind the podium, not so much. Banksy’s clever trick is sure to earn him a footnote in auction history, which is no stranger to stunts (most involving chandelier pricing). Still, this one did give rise to a slender hope that if such tricks become an auction house staple, serious people might go back to buying art the old-fashioned way — from galleries. But not yet. Everyone was back at the madness the following week, bidding up a Hockney and a Hopper to record prices. -retrieved from the New York Times posted on December 5, 2018, written by Roberta Smith.
Banksy has also fooled many world-renowned museums in the past, including Musée du Louvre, Tate, the British Museum, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He cleverly avoided the strict security system and quietly hang his work next to the permanent collection of the pavilion. Interestingly, his work was not immediately revealed, but it was discovered after a while.
Wondering if the Bansky's action event making other artists to follow it and is that really the right way to improve the career of an artist?
Resources:
Best Art of 2018
Link: https://reurl.cc/QLEeo
Figure 1: Banksy, Love Is in the Bin, 2018 © Sotheby
