Ultimate practical joke: $1.3M Banksy Artwork “Self-Destructs” at Auction

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FlyingPenguin
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Ultimate practical joke: $1.3M Banksy Artwork “Self-Destructs” at Auction

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“[It] sold for over a million dollars and as we sat there…the painting started moving,” he said, and added that the painting’s frame, also made by Banksy, acted as a shredder and started to cut the canvas into strips. “[It was] all out confusion then complete excitement,” he explained.
https://hyperallergic.com/464419/1-3m-b ... t-auction/
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Re: Ultimate practical joke: $1.3M Banksy Artwork “Self-Destructs” at Auction

Post by Err »

That's amazing. I'd love to have a print of that piece though.
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Re: Ultimate practical joke: $1.3M Banksy Artwork “Self-Destructs” at Auction

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SOMEONE at the auction house HAD to be in on this. If you read the comments in the YouTube clip, a lot of people pointed out the obvious: This painting is 10 or 12 years old. In all that time no one opened the frame? Why wouldn't the auction house open it to verify the authenticity (art experts art 50/50 on this one - they say if it was framed by the artist, opening it could reduce it's value)? WHO triggered the shredder? How likely is it that the batteries would still be good? I'm not the only one that noticed that it looks like the auctioneer himself pushed a button on his podium just before it happened.

The early part of the video, purportedly by Bansky from his Instagram account, claiming to show the insides, looks fishy: the shredding mechanism doesn't look like it would actually work. No way to know if that's for real or not.

I've watched the video several times now, and I'm convinced that the mechanism jammed and that Bansky originally intended to have it completely shred into strips and fall on the floor, which would have been awesome.

It's still a brilliant gag, but there has to be a lot more to this story.

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Re: Ultimate practical joke: $1.3M Banksy Artwork “Self-Destructs” at Auction

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Some interesting observations by art experts in this article:

https://www.ft.com/content/5d692b72-ca4 ... ad351828ab

It's behind a paywall I think. Worked the first time for me but not the second so here goes:
Banksy leaves credibility of art market in shreds
Stunt or performance art, fate of painting risks reinforcing suspicions over auctions

The photograph says it all. Normally calm art market professionals, still on the phone to clients, look on slack-jawed as “Girl With Balloon” is sliced up by a shredder concealed within its own picture frame.

As a piece of anarchist theatre or anti-market “performance art”, the prank by the street artist Banksy could hardly have been more of a triumph. It made a mockery of the auction and those prepared to pay huge sums for his work — the image, now in ribbons, had just sold for more than £1m, including fees.

Coming during the Frieze art fair, when collectors and dealers gather in London for a packed week of sales and shows, the story generated coverage around the world, stealing the limelight from the record-breaking sales that the auction houses had hoped to see publicised.

But the more insidious effect of the stunt may be to pile pressure on an auction model already under scrutiny. It is a market in which the identity of buyers and sellers is now routinely not disclosed and a network of opaque relationships exists between auction houses, collectors, dealers and gallerists.

As speculation swirls over the circumstances of the booby-trapped sale, it risks reinforcing suspicions among some buyers and sellers that they can no longer find a fair price in the auction room.

Sotheby’s specialists appeared wrongfooted by the prank on Friday night and later insisted they had been unaware of the plan. “We had no prior knowledge of this event and were not in any way involved,” it said in a statement.

Yet some art market experts said they found it difficult to believe that the organisation — or one or more of its staff — had not been complicit in the prank, in which its specialists had apparently missed the presence of a large and complex shredding mechanism inside a chunky frame.

A video was published on Banksy’s Instagram page on Saturday, showing a hoodie-wearing figure setting up a frame with a line of blades hidden inside — “in case it was ever put up for auction”, the caption read.

Bendor Grosvenor, an art historian and former dealer, said the prank may have been fun and “even clever” but was “just another glimpse into contemporary art market hypocrisy”.

“Sotheby’s really ask [us] to believe they weren’t in on it? Come on,” he said on Twitter.

Georgina Adam, art market editor-at-large for the Art Newspaper, said she had also been surprised by the scheduling of the Banksy as the final lot. “This tends to be a position for a minor work as the saleroom tends to be emptying at the time and while the estimate was not enormous [at £200,000-£300,000], there is always a lot of interest in Banksy’s work.”

Frames of Old Masters — those painted in Europe before 1800 or so — are sometimes dismantled before auction to allow experts to assess their condition and history. The same does not always apply to contemporary works, where artists sometimes stipulate that the frame is part of the artwork and should not be tampered with or removed.

Nonetheless, Ms Adam said she found it “a stretch of the imagination” that the heavy frame had not attracted attention. Others questioned why the work had not been X-rayed ahead of the sale, though auction market experts said such analysis is not routinely carried out on paintings.

Doug Woodham, founder of Art Fiduciary Advisors and a former president of Christie’s for the Americas, said he believed Sotheby’s was unlikely to have been complicit in the stunt. “If it knew something and did not disclose it — and if a buyer could prove that — it opens up a can of worms in terms of liability for the auction house.”

He argued Sotheby’s would not have taken such a risk to its reputation even if, as some have suggested, the shredded Banksy is now expected to be worth even more as a result of the prank.

But John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the episode may have put Sotheby’s in a tight spot regardless. “Either you’ve rigged this auction or you’re so incompetent you couldn’t discover this elaborate mechanism for destroying [the work]. And that suggests a lack of controls. There’s no way [for Sotheby’s] to win.”
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Re: Ultimate practical joke: $1.3M Banksy Artwork “Self-Destructs” at Auction

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Myth-busting the self-shredding Banksy painting

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/09/myth- ... eddin.html
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Re: Ultimate practical joke: $1.3M Banksy Artwork “Self-Destructs” at Auction

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"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

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